


When We See the Sea

by whitesilverandmercury



Series: When We See the Sea [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin
Genre: Canon, M/M, explorations in world building, so much nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-02-26 22:25:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2668580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Staring at Eren is like staring into the sun; they say it blinds but men do it anyway. And Jean is a young man who wears his heart on his sleeve but guards it with the spade ready to dig his own grave. </p><p>“We’re going to see the sea, Jean. Me, Armin, Mikasa. One day, I swear it. And when we see the sea, I want you to be there, too. Promise you’ll be there, too.”</p><p>// erejean, canon. part two <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/13556916/chapters/31109031">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. l'appel du vide

**Author's Note:**

> here we go, starting on another chaptered fic. 8) i wanted to experiment in canon. spotify [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/12169251584/playlist/2OZGUINyfg1GaXNij4rlQ7?si=Wl__tQ5jTYaGY8XgRpkomA). oh god the nostalgia as;dlgdjs explorations in world-building, & visiting some good old canon events

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> check out my [patreon](http://www.patreon.com/whitesilverandmercury)! ☆☆

PART ONE | THE YOUNG SOLDIERS _  
_

 i. L'APPEL DU VIDE

* * *

“Do you like him?” Mikasa asks. She is winning at poker again. The cards are faded and dog-eared, stained by God knows what. In the warm, dimly-lit lounge of the 104th East C Dormitory, Sasha is trying to read Mikasa’s hand over her shoulder. Armin has the second best poker face in their dorm—second only after Mikasa.

Eren snorts, chokes on a scoff, a rebuttal, a forced laugh. “Like who? _Jean_?” He remembers suddenly that this is not a private conversation. Other trainees are flopped on their bunks, on sofas, in chairs near the stove. Layer upon layer of separate voices in here but still Eren lowers his, scowling at Mikasa. His ears burn red.

Mikasa tucks her hair behind her ear; he’s still getting used to it being short, but he’s glad she took his advice and cut it. She looks older. She looks better. She looks fierce and _Mikasa_.

“Do you like him?” she asks again, and her eyes burn holes into Eren in the calmest, most knowing way.

Eren throws a card down and draws another. “No. He drives me crazy. He pretends he doesn’t know how good he is because he’s selfish and scared and he’d rather play it safe and be a cocky snob the rest of his life and it _pisses me off_ —”

“Why do you care, though?”

“I don’t know. _Because_.”

“Remember what your mom told me once before?”

Little stab of pain, right through the ribs, into the heart. _Mom._ It is a wound that will never heal; it’s a splinter in his soul that will never work loose. And it hurts afresh with each accidental nudge. Armin glances at Eren from behind his cards. Sasha is trying to mimic Mikasa’s poker face poise. Lamplight bounces around her dimpled frown and furrowed brow. Outside, the mountain wind claws at the dorms.

“What?” Eren grunts noncommittally.

“That boys pick on girls they like,” Mikasa reminds.

Eren sputters. The suggestion is just too much. Heat rolls in a panicked wave up from his toes to his cheeks; it isn’t anger so much as embarrassment, the churning sea inside, and Eren is, for a moment, without words. But then he finds them again. They’re salty through his teeth like maybe the sea is, too:

“Yeah, I remember, and that’s still bullshit. Thankfully you never listened to her, you and me, we kicked so much ass. ‘Boys pick on girls they like.’ Well, we shouldn’t tell girls it’s okay to be picked on—no, we shouldn’t teach boys it’s okay to pick on anyone at all. That’s just fucked up—”

Mikasa sighs. She lays down a Royal Flush and wins the round of cards.

* * *

Military training is designed to break a man down and rebuild him as a soldier.

Some men lose themselves in the process; others find themselves. It is a high-risk gamble. Live as a terrified civilian at the whims of authority or become that authority and live at the whims of the universe.

Some will die. The training is not by any means _easy_ or even _safe_ at times. The conditions are hard; there is no other way. There is a medic and the medic’s assistant is also a mortician who has a special covered cart in which he transports the dead out of the military camp. It wouldn’t be kosher to have a cemetery next to dormitories, after all, never mind the political correctness of the small wooden Wallist chapel behind Shadis’s office for those who give a toss.

They are all first years here in the mountains. The 104th Training Squad, officially.

The breaking begins with menial drills—chores, laps, physical conditioning. The weak and unwilling are weeded out like rotten crop. The rest harden up. Three weeks of obstacle courses becomes three weeks of endurance runs, sprinting and jumping and climbing with heavy packs in the wind and the rain and the high altitude. Aptitude scores already count in tiered classrooms where government-approved textbooks fill the silence with written word. Chalk dust chokes as lectures on history and strategy commence; the lessons will deepen in detail and discussion as the program continues. Technical skills and equestrianism are equally important, tested weekly.

Soon the training will tighten up into combat, military history and tactic, vertical maneuvering, gymnastics, G-force acclimatizing, practice missions in the pines outside the camp. For now it is basic training. It is peeling potatoes in the kitchen, running laps and cleaning latrines, it is tumbling out of bed in the morning aching but ready, and sitting down to beet soup or rotisserie and cabbage at dinner like a religious experience every night, enough to distract from the occasional training _accident_ , talk of which circulates in reverent whispers for the dead or injured. God, Eren thought he knew hunger before. He didn’t know hunger before. He knew labor and bruised cold fingers and dirt under his nails and the stomachache of wanting more but not having more. But that wasn’t _this_ hunger, this sense of exhausted triumph and of _earning_ his meals, really _deserving_ them. Three fucking meals a day. Hunger that actually matters.

On weekends, they are allowed coffee. Bitter, black, sometimes gritty coffee, but it’s a luxury and sometimes— _sometimes_ —there is even sugar or cream!

Blaring sirens wake the recruits just before dawn; there are weekly room checks and instructors patrol the barracks for the first hour or two of moderately-enforced curfew at night. Every other day, there is recreation hour. The courtyard and dormitory lounges fill with voices and laughter and echoes of _innocence_ where the rest of the days only contain _instinct_ , the grounds crawling with children who are hardly children anymore—playing cards, opening the scarce care package, practicing techniques and gymnastics, reading (old by now) newspapers, playing music in the lounges.

Conny’s last care package from the south had a small _barbitos_ in it, from his brother he said, running around from dorm to dorm to show off his wicked prize. He plays it during rec hour, sprawled in some lounge or another, fiddling idly with the little stringed instrument, or trying to pluck an old nursery rhyme or familiar tune out of it, feet crossed at the ankles and wagging excitedly together and sometimes Mina comes over with a _buben_ , a tambourine, and Thomas stomps his feet and taps his toes and drums his palms and raps his knuckles like the old fishermen tavern traditions, and nights like these, with everyone involved, it’s easy to forget soldierhood, and tragedy, and the crisis of potential human extinction for a while.

Sasha claps her hands and cheers. Thomas starts in with the low cajoling fishermen tavern songs, musical poetry about traveling the rivers between the walls. Ymir starts to dance and Eren jumps up to join her because the folk dances she knows are not all too different from the folk dances he knows, and they stomp and they sweep and they tap their toes in, tap their heels out, fists on their hips. They laugh and they join arms and let their free hands weave like snakes as they turn in choppy circles because they can’t figure out how to twist their hips and roll their bodies in the right tempo together as Thomas stomps, Sasha sings a hunter’s hymn, Conny plays the tiny guitar.

“ _Woah-oh, oh-woah, Saturn had to be fed. Oh-woah, woah-oh, old Saturn fell down dead!_ ”

And an hour in, it’s all sorts of beautiful chaos, a tiny crowd in a well-lit dormitory lounge, cheers and shouts and folk songs from all corners of Utopia rattling up to the rafters. An instructor named Vajda even claps and cheers, too, from the main door, the gray afternoon fading into early evening shadows in the forest behind him. Mina and Christa have danced the palm-to-palm waltz; Hannah has done the spin; Berthold has shown off a sharp, exotic twist from even further south. Eren pushes papers and books and a small lamp off the table in the center of the room and climbs atop, gesturing for Armin to join him and Armin joins him and Marco joins him because he knows this number, too, and they do the complicated turns and footwork and jumps together, laughing and yelling and gasping together, apocalyptic thunder of their heels and stomps on the wood, they are sweaty and out of breath and so, so sore, so sore because their legs are too tired from training, their backs are aching, their shoulders are stiff but this moment of bliss and happiness is all too relieving to pass up—

“ _When we see the sea, she says, push me out on the little boat you made out of the evergreen…_ ”

It is times like these that they come together as humans, and the humanity hums like a string from Conny’s _barbitos_ , or the metal rings in Mina’s tambourine, and they relish in their humanity and they rejoice in their humanity and they are one, they are all one.

“ _Leave me in the cold, she says, until the snow covers me up…_ ”

And Jean watches from a boxy couch—near the window, near the stove stack. He watches curled up on his side, his chin in his hand, his finger in a book. He does not watch with that cavalier smirk of his; he does not watch with the snotty scowl, either.

_Do you like him?_

Sometimes Jean’s eyes are sad, and he watches them now with those sad eyes, and turning in fast, stomping circles on the table between Marco and Armin, hands on his hip and then hands in the air, a scuff of the heel, twist of the knee, flick of the hip and turn, turning again, Eren catches them.

“ _And I cannot move, embedded in the frost, see, when we see the sea…_ ”

Jean does not mean the things that he says—the things that piss Eren off, that incite Eren to argument, that make Eren feel pathetic and terrified and hopeless, misguided, destined for failure.

Jean is scared. He is alone. They are all scared and alone.

And Eren wants _so badly_ to hate Jean for being scared, for his sad distant eyes. But he can’t. He doesn’t hate him for his inflammatory remarks and heedless boasting at dinner, or his quick retreat when Instructor Shadis investigates the noise in the refectory because apparently his trainee score card is more important than whatever cause he shamelessly pretends to cling to. _Safer there in the interior_. _Easy life_. _I don’t care._ But he does care. And Eren knows he cares. And maybe Eren just wants to hear him admit that he cares, either because he wants Jean to care or he wants to believe there are not people out there who _don’t_.

“Fight later?”

“Fuck off, Jäger.”

He doesn’t hate him, though.Jean _cares_. He cares more than he likes to confess because maybe not confessing how much he cares is his careful shield. And no one can hate him for that.

_Do you like him?_

He holds Jean’s eyes every turn until the turn where Jean isn’t looking anymore, because Jean has flung himself off of the couch and gone outside for fresh air.

* * *

Fights between trainees are not tolerated.

Fights are punishable by demeaning chores or humiliating maybe a little unethical “time-outs”—standing in the center of the courtyard in the rain, running laps for hours straight, trading laundry with one’s nemesis for a week. Trainees can lose precious points on their personal score cards for fights. Fights break out now and again; it is only to be expected in the physically demanding, emotionally traumatizing pressure cooker of a military training camp.

Like everyone looks to the Shiganshina kids for stories about the Fall of the Wall or the Colossal Titan like ghost stories around the campfire, when a fight breaks out everyone looks to Eren and Jean. It’s not always them, though.

(Usually it’s them.)

They butt heads. They argue. They shove. They spite. They torment. They tease. They sneer. They heckle. They compete with ruthless determination, probably trying to prove themselves to themselves more than to each other. They are still practically strangers but they bicker like brothers or jilted lovers.

But no, they do not hate each other.

On the contrary, they are necessary for each other.

Without Eren, all that reckless drive and unswaying passion, Jean is nothing but logical backfires and reasoning his way deep and irreparable into self-doubt. He doesn’t want to _be_ Eren, no, he just needs Eren to _be there_. Eren keeps him on his toes. Eren keeps him _trying_. And that feels stupid; it feels pathetic. Jean isn’t quite sure what the right words are for it. But that is how it is.

Silver tongues and flashing eye contact, smirks, hand gestures, silent dares—the language of boys, in the vein of passion and principles, every possessive protective trait, every unspoken rule of loyalty, chivalry, betrayal, dignity, integrity, bravery, fear of failure, all this _pietas_ seemingly pointless and confusing to those without these poignant codes hardwired into their every pattern of thought, their every impulse.

Or it’s the language of idiots who are too different in very vital ways to admit just how alike they are in many other ways, and it’s a secret language of gestures and glances and grunts only they know quite how to translate though God knows everyone around them tries.

“If you were close enough to _see_ the Colossal Titan, why didn’t you kill it?”

“You would have wet your pants, Kirschtein—”

“God damn, you refugees are all the same, all defensive and…”

“What’s the matter? Are you tired, pretty boy?”

“Fuck off, Jäger—”

“Hey! Stop showing off!”

“Stop _sucking!_ ”

“This isn’t a game, you know. I’m going to kill them all.”

“Right, I’ll remember that when you’re going down in history books as a dead martyr and I’m still safe and sound by the king—”

Theirs is a raw, ambitious, and volatile competition, a rivalryat best and stubborn misunderstandings at worst. It is both resilient and fragile, like feelings. It is not hatred. And sometimes it crosses a line, hits a wrong nerve.

“You’re so _lazy!_ ”

“Yeah, well at least I don’t still piss the bed at night over my mamma getting swallowed—”

Oh.

_Shit_.

The feeling behind that one was completely different from its utterly disastrous execution, but there it is. Step one: open mouth; step two: insert foot.

The way the eager scowl on Eren Jaeger’s face justifiably shatters into a look of absolute horror and pain is perhaps one of the worst things Jean has seen in a long time, and it is especially bad because it is his fault and it is bad because he can’t remember Eren looking at anyone with such empty traumatized eyes ever, and it is _bad_ because with someone as half-cocked as Eren, what is there to expect after a cold and broken stare like that?

The rustle of wind through the grounds is one with the chorus of peanut gallery _Ooohhh_ s and other remarks from passersby looking on from a safe distance.

“You know he killed three men,” a girl from the East with an uncle in the MP whispers to another.

In a split-second, they are a tangled knot of punches and elbows and knees, hands desperate for purchase clawing at sleeves and shoulders. Eren hits him with a surprise left; Jean blocks half of it with a tender forearm. It does not usually escalate this far. It is usually only word games between them, battles of wit and will. Competition. And then—after Jean thinks it can’t get worse, it’s already reached the pinnacle of _bad_ —it gets worse—and he feels like the ultimate dunce.

Their secret language doesn’t oft include open tears, but here Eren is _bawling_.

He stops throwing hits. He just sits there on top of Jean, strange heat and real person weight, toes digging into the ground and knees shaking against Jean’s sides.

Vicious stab of guilt. Jean had been unnecessarily cruel and God fucking damn it, Eren never thinks before he talks, either, so why is Jean the only one to get the ultimate punishment for saying the wrong damn thing?

Jean pries at Eren’s elbows, trying to get to his face. Eye contact. A lot can be said through eye contact when the tongue utterly fails. It takes a good minute of wrestling to free Eren’s sobbing scowl from his arms but free it Jean does, and then he yanks the son of a bitch into a headlock of a hug, offhandedly conscious they are still on the ground and people are staring but he is far too concerned about this odd and uncomfortable wave of panic in the wake of a personal flaw to really care.

“I can’t—fucking believe you—you pretentious motherfucker—” Hissing whispers, hiccups in his ear, gasps for breath as the 104th’s resident maniac struggles to calm himself, fingers curled so tight in Jean’s shirt, Jean can feel them trembling. Hot knuckles. _Life_. Why is his heart pounding so hard?

“I’m sorry, Eren—shit, I’m _sorry_ , okay—I didn’t mean to say it—I can’t apologize any more, I’m just saying the same thing over and over again—”

“ _It’s fine!_ ” Eren growls.

He rips away. He kicks up dirt under Jean and he is wiping violently at his tear-streaked face. Jean is vaguely aware of his left cheekbone throbbing; Eren clocked him good with an elbow, whether on accident or not. And Eren is halfway away now, moving fast and fired up towards Block C of dorms.

Conny and Marco are already rushing to Jean’s side from the porch of the building. But Marlo is here, helping Jean up off the ground. Stares. The stares are eating him alive. He is ashamed and he is shocked by himself and he isn’t quite sure what to do.

“Your nose is bleeding—” Marlo sputters.

“Nice one, big boy,” Hitch purrs. “You totally won, by the way.”

Jean is briefly terrified that Mikasa might show up next to kick his ass even more, more terrified than an instructor coming over to ding him with disciplinary action, but that fear is short-lived and snuffed out by the heavy guilt. Except _guilt_ isn’t good enough a word; it is _regret_ and _disgust_ and it is making him feel sick to his stomach.

Eren drives him up a God damn wall, but in a strange shockingly alluring way, he is a train wreck, he is _pathos_ , he is everything Jean is not and Jean is drawn to him like a moth to the flame but Jean doesn’t want Eren to _hate_ him, no.

He does not.

* * *

The sun is out. It’s a perfect autumn day—blustery, crisp, bright. The pines beyond the grounds shiver in the mountain wind. Hawks circle above the road, above the trash pits, the coals of weekly garbage raked into the dirt after burning.

Voices bounce. Whistles punctuate here and there. Instructors pace between the lines in the quad.

Eren stands with Annie and Reiner, watching Jean easily disarm his fight partner of the gaudy little wooden blade during combat drills, take him down in a seamless shuffle of elbows and knees and grappling moves.

_Do you like him?_

Nobody is talking about last week’s spectacle, the fight outside the dorm blocks. It’s in the past. It was no big deal. Eren didn’t even tell Mikasa why he was crying; he’s so sick of running to her crying. _Don’t tell anyone I cried_. Well, everyone knew he cried. In a place like this, nobody begrudges tears, apparently. Like the dust in the quad, it all just sort of…settled.

_At least I don’t still piss the bed_ —

“I don’t piss the bed, by the way,” Eren snapped under his breath a night after the fight, elbowing past Jean’s table with his dinner in the mess hall.

Jean said nothing, which was probably for the better.

_You know he killed three men_.

Another whistle in the quad. Hitch is assigned dish duty on her own for slapping Marlo across the face because he, apparently, threw her to the ground too hard.

And Jean takes the disarm from his partner like a champ, breaking his fall perfectly with his heels. Rolls and falls were week one; what the fuck is Hitch’s problem. Jean hits the ground and his back arches. He keeps his knees springy.

Eren rips his eyes from Jean’s body, terrified of watching any longer.

_Do you like him?_

_No, I fucking hate his guts_. It’s a lie. Eren does not hate Jean. There is no such thing as _hate_.

Hate is just the easiest side of something altogether more terrible.

The 104th graduates to bungee training, armed and unarmed combat, and day missions into the evergreen forests outside camp’s barbed-wire topped fences.

Eren’s toes and palms are scraped up from the rock climbing; muscles in his arms he wasn’t even aware of are sore every morning and every night. Berthold was _ambushed_ by an instructor—that is, his lifeline cord was cut in an unannounced test of his skill climbing a cliff face.

“God, if that happens to me, I’ll die…” Armin moans from his bunk, but he’s really exaggerating, and he tries to pay Bert for the menthol rub for his sore back in smuggled dessert but Bert won’t take it. He never takes it. He gives out massages for free and only smiles.

“No, you won’t,” Bert promises. “You’ll just climb, like you would if it wasn’t training.”

“Yeah,” Eren grumbles, craning down from the top bunk. “What he said, Armin.”

The awful truth is that someone _does_ die, but this is the graphic, ghastly life of a soldier in training. The mortician rattles his way up the road away from camp and in his cart he has three drop-outs and a dead body.

Nobody wants to sing and dance during the rec hour after that.

It is getting colder out; rain is a constant promise, breathing down the neck, heavy mother-of-pearl clouds smeared above the mountains and the crisp kiss of coming winter nipping at noses and fingers and ears.

“Day Mission!” the whispers roll through camp over breakfast, during roll call. “Day Mission!” It brings with it the metallic taste of nervousness—excitement, fear.

They are being sent in small waves out into the forest on a pseudo-scavenger hunt; their survival skills are being put to the test after endurance runs, supply drills, and tracking lessons. They will have no horses. They will have a hunting knife each, a water flask, a compass, some flint and a map. They are to complete the scavenger hunt in twenty-four hours or less, graded on their time. It’s not quite the Wasteland March that will come later in the program, but it’s enough.

This is, actually, an easy exercise.

It begins to rain two hours into the third wave of trainees.

Something about the tall deep green trees puts Eren a little on edge.

He’s not _afraid_ ; he just really doesn’t want to be alone in the forest. And he is alone. There is life around him, forest life—chipmunks and birds chattering, rustling in the foliage, the occasional flash of tawny jacket and dark boots as someone else stomps by through the underbrush. But he is alone. And now it’s raining.

The rain isn’t bad at first, held at bay by the branches and coverage. By the time Eren has found and collected the first scavenger prize and is starting to get really angry about just how fucking hard this is on his own, the rain is really coming down. It’s an icy rain. It bites at his naked hands. It’s just hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to soak him immediately, and the slow soaking is the worst because it chills him to the bone before he really even feels it and from there he’s doomed.

He seeks shelter under a fallen tree, its giant roots clinging to the earth like a wall of dirt. There’s a few dry inches to huddle here. It is just raining too hard to go on. He doesn’t want to ruin the map.

“God _damn it!_ ” he shouts in frustration, hoarsely, and he likes the way his voice echoes around the bark and dancing leaves, the puddles deepening into real mud. The birds and critters are quiet now. The moss doesn’t seem to be growing on the north side of the trees. The rain is musical between the branches. He clenches his teeth to keep them from chattering.

He kicks a soggy pine cone.

“Eren!”

Eren turns, peeking around the toppled tree.

Up, through the dark greens and sparks of silver that is the vindictive rain, a little bit up the hill behind the tree, it is Jean. His pack is sopping wet. His shoulders are hunched. From this far away, Eren can see him shivering hard and he looks angry, he’s snarling, but maybe he’s just trying not to let his teeth chatter, either. Eren’s heart gives a tiny jump.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, they have also graduated from last names to first names. And Eren hates it. He hates it because he doesn’t hate it at all.

“What?” Eren shouts back.

“What item are you on?”

“I’m not telling you. You’ll be a dick about it.”

“No, I won’t.”

Eren doesn’t really hesitate. “Two!” he confesses, motioning for Jean to join him in the almost-dry. “What about you?”

Jean doesn’t answer yet; it seems too much effort when all the effort he has left is put into bounding down the slick muddy slope and into the almost-refuge. He is far wetter than Eren. His face is pale. His eyes burn alive like two little hazel embers.

“Two,” he finally answers, nodding like it’s an agreement, though he seems reluctant to be teaming up, restrained by stubborn pride. Eren can sympathize. “I can’t fucking figure out—where it is—”

He’s having trouble spitting the words out, his teeth are clenched so tight. Eren doesn’t blame him. His fingers ache from the wet and the cold. He points to a pine, sniffling loudly. He can’t tell if it’s rain or snot dripping from his nose.

“If we climb up a little bit, we might be able to see the next point—”

“I can’t climb right now, Eren—”

“Sure you can, Jean—it’s not that hard—I can give you a boost—”

“I can’t—feel my hands, you don’t understand—”

“So warm them up a little—shake them around—”

“I can’t—”

Eren tries to demonstrate, hopping from foot to foot, waving his hands and wiggling his fingers below his waist. Jean tries to follow his lead. There is nothing but the rain and their shivering breaths and the gross wet squishing of their boots in the mud.

“This is stupid,” Jean hisses.

“You’re stupid,” Eren fires back.

“Let’s try to climb,” Jean suggests, though he looks sick with the idea of it.

The trees are slipperier than expected; it’s no simple task with wet hands and wetter boots. Eren almost slips a few times. He hits his knees on knobby bark, scrapes his palms on dried sap. His pants are clinging to his thighs which makes it hard to move and they’re cold, cold, cold. And dirty. Mikasa’s going to kill him when she does laundry. He’s still very upset that Mikasa and Armin are not with him right now. He’s upset that he’s upset. He wants to be able to operate on his own.

“ _I can’t—_ ”

Jean crumples down to his haunches under the towering tree, arms going up to shield his head like the rain is attacking him. He’s swearing, shouting, but it’s clenched-teeth gibberish and muffled. Eren is already five branches up. Breathing hard, he concedes and shimmies back down.

“What the fuck do you mean, you can’t?”

“This is _too hard!_ What, do they think we’re superhuman?”

“They wouldn’t make us do something we can’t do—”

“I don’t know, Shadis is one sadistic fuck, Eren! Did you see the way he had Bert’s lifeline cut the other day?”

“Jean—”

“I can’t fucking do this! I’m cold! I’m tired! Everything is soaking wet! I can’t do this, this is bullshit!”

Is this even the same young man as _At least I don’t still piss the bed_ _at night over my mamma getting swallowed_ —

Yes. Yes, it is, and he is panicking, Eren realizes.

This is not about stubborn pride or competition anymore; Jean is tense and unsure what to do and he’s panicking. Eren wants to yell. He can’t handle Jean panicking. The panicking part, yes, but also the part where he’s panicking _in front of him_. It just seems unnatural. It feels very wrong and, frankly, horrifying. They aren’t supposed to be this honest with each other. This is not part of their routine. What is he supposed to do?

Eren tries to pull Jean up by the collar; his fingers are so cold and wet, it hurts, stabbing pain. “Get the fuck up!” he snaps, because now Jean has him panicking, too, panicking about what to do about Jean panicking. Failure just isn’t an option. Hopelessness is a great hollow void. He will not let any of his friends or comrades believe in this void. “You _can_ do this, we can do it together—”

“Oh, don’t give me your saintly crap right now, okay? I don’t need your pep talks and your cheerleading—”

“Wow, _fuck you_ , I’m just trying to help!”

“Yeah, well Eren, your version of ‘trying to help’ is a lot of crusading for your own cause. ‘Look, I’m helping, I’m so great, aren’t I great?’”

“Well, _one of us_ has to be levelheaded here and it obviously ain’t you!” Eren smacks Jean open-palmed on both shoulders, though it’s a paltry attempt at an actual shove. Forget about panicking; now he’s kind of offended. This is not at all what he intends. Is that really what people think of him? _Crusading for his own cause_ —

Jean is trying to look angry. He’s trying to scowl, to get his sarcastic eyebrow up in action and his lip curled in that cool guy frown of his. But he is failing. There is perfect fear in his burning ember eyes and Eren understands suddenly that that fear is where all his cruel words are coming from, nowhere honest. Jean is helpless to them, he is more afraid of them than the meaning hiding behind them. He is a young man who wears his heart on his sleeve but guards it with the spade ready to dig his own grave.

Eren can’t think straight suddenly. He is all sorts of worked up and he demands, voice cracking in pitch, “Why do you hate me?” It’s heating him up a little to yell. Some hiding birds scatter from a branch overhead at the commotion.

“I _don’t_ hate you!” Jean parries, rain spraying from his lower lip and his lashes. Eren does not like how gray and dead he looks, cold and soggy as he is. Oh, he

_Do you like him?_

really does not like it.

“You could’ve fooled me,” Eren sneers.

“I don’t _fucking_ hate you,” Jean drags out, theatrically, and at least he has enough not-panic left to roll his eyes in a grand way, shaping every syllable carefully, deliberately, somehow smooth and hot even through the cold rain. Thatis the Jean Eren knows. “I _admire_ you—”

Eren rears back like Jean has swung a fist. _That_ is…not what he knows. It is not what he expected, either.

His ears are ringing. Something is coming to a peak here, something is reaching a fever pitch, all their arguing and tension and frustration is sharpening to a dangerous point, and it is the point of a Roman nail, yes, poised at his heart—

“What?” Eren whispers, brow knotting. There is no more yelling; he speaks soft and tiny like he hadn’t just been so angry his voice vibrated in his chest.

“You heard me,” Jean spits. “I admire you, okay?”

_Do you like him?_

“You’re like the fucking sun—”

_Do you like him?_

“And I’m only—the—the moon or something—”

_Do you like him?_

“Just reflecting your fucking light—”

Ah yes, because this has never been about true rivalry, has it, but flirting, attention, need masquerading as playful torment, and those sad hazel eyes and flushed cheeks and dripping lashes are the final blow to stake the Roman nail right through his heart. Irreversible. If the crucifixion’s removed, he will bleed out.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Eren rushes out in one chilled, breathless whisper, agonized suddenly by this private torture Jean has confessed to, anguished now that he is hurting someone without meaning to, what—what does that even mean—and then as he reaches forth Jean meets him halfway and something snaps, something splinters, something just utterly gives way and they’re backed up against the tree with their mouths together and Jean’s clammy hands cup his face, his clammy thumbs stroke rain off his cheeks, which doesn’t matter, because it’s still raining, and Eren is hot with nerves, his heart is racing so hard below his throat and he’s a little upset that Jean’s lips are so wet but they’re not _cold_ and that is just magical, they fit perfectly with his, or so it seems, so he believes, and he’s _mad_ because he wishes Jean would hate _him_ more than he apparently hates _himself_ —

Jean pulls away gently, with a tender little _pop_ of their lower lips. He is looking down, lashes lowered. He’s staring at Eren’s open mouth; he’s mirroring the pinched expression of faint, guilty horror, brow dimpled. He looks confused and a little affronted like he has no idea what has just happened or if he liked it or not. His chest rolls against Eren’s; Eren is sure he can feel his heart pounding just as hard.

There is nothing to be said about it.

It is still raining.

Jean is still looking at his mouth.

Maybe he’s memorizing it—the way it looks, the way it felt, the way it tasted.

Eren’s head is spinning and he feels feverish suddenly. The connection between them is electric, cathartic, he is stunned and he is galvanized and he is overcome by how much he wants to kiss again. There is a song in his head. One of the folk songs, the one they all keep singing when Conny gets out his stupid little guitar—

_When we see the sea, she says, push me out on the little boat you made out of the evergreen…_

_Leave me in the rain, wait until my clothes cling to my frame; wipe away your tear stains.  
‘I thought you said you didn’t feel pain,’ she says…_

Jean lets him go. He backs away. He won’t meet Eren’s eyes; Eren cannot tell if he regrets what they’ve just done and if he does, if it’s because he didn’t like it or if because he wants it again, too. He is starting to walk away. Voice thick, he husks over his shoulder, “Let’s finish this fucking scavenger hunt and get back to camp.”

* * *

_“According to my grandpa’s book, the outside world is ten times bigger than the world inside the walls—and there’s fire water—and ice ground—and fields of sand—and the majority of the world is covered by water called ‘the sea!’”_

Eren saw him that first day of training, and his heart lurched and his stomach knotted up like a sea inside him, cresting, crashing, swirling, threatening to drag him under because he was lost to the icy choppy salt-filled tides and he didn’t know how to swim—

_Jean Kirschtein_.

The motherfucker.

The wind ripped through the military camp, coming down hard through the craggy peaks, the walls of rock where the training camp had been carved into the mountainside. It rattled the barbed-wire on the wooden fences, stirred up dirt on the only road winding up the rock face; the initial roll call was through and his knees and back ached from the standing at attention but the sunshine was bright and bleached up here, merciless, biting, and Eren was hot, he was tired, he was nervous, he was frozen in place and he was _angry_ because he was not about to be so blushing and distracted by the roiling sea inside him that he would neglect making it to the _actual_ sea one day.

He was a little taller than him, with ash blond hair tousled above brow and ears. The kids back in Shiganshina had called Eren a _pretty boy_ a few times, which had apparently been an insult, but Eren had never really understood what it meant until Jean. Worse yet, Jean was a smirker. Worse even than that, he was fit and pretty athletic. Far worse than that, he was smart but judging by the way he boasted and laughed, leaning up against dorms surrounded by other guys loitering just as smugly, he knew he was and that was usually a problem. Worst of all, his eyes were not innocent. They were kind of sad.

Jean _fucking_ Kirschtein.

Ah God, if only Eren had _known_.

* * *

**_end ch. i_ **


	2. heart skipped a beat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sky is a brittle blue; there are clouds blowing in from over the mountains but the sun still makes them squint. The wind tosses hair in and out of Eren’s eyes as he rolls up and onto his elbows at Jean’s side, brow knotted impatiently, lip curled, and cuts into the idle chitchat: “Yeah, but what is dating, anyway?” A deep current of seemingly meaningless meaning forged in the crucible of painful mortal experience, maybe. Distraction from looming existential crises, terror management, maybe. Or thanatophobia. Maybe.

ii. HEART SKIPPED A BEAT

* * *

There is something about not knowing if he’ll live to see the day after tomorrow that heightens existentiality and sharpens the deadly blade of instinct. It falls like a guillotine to keep thought and need starkly divorced should logic threaten primal desires or desires undermine rationality.

Who cares about a kiss, a pointless pathetic kiss?

Where is the purpose to holding hands, knotting fingers like the chain of an anchor on boats whose journeys depend not on the tracks underwater but instead on the fickle shoulders of waves of lore?

What is the rhyme or reason for sharing body heat in a moment of desperate inclination—a mite of control to spite the uncontrollable, a shiver of human connection to remind Jean what it is to be alive, with a heartbeat, with a pulse, with mortal bones and mortal flesh and a very mortal spine?

What the _fuck_ should kissing even _matter_ to them, when they could all be titan chow and titan vomit by sundown tomorrow?

Eren Jäger does not seem to be plagued by this innate terror, this bead of poison, this panic and all its many secret gleeful triggers. It makes Jean susceptible to self-hate more than self-doubt because self-hate requires less thought and responsibilities, but thought and responsibility is what Eren demands of him and so they always fight. They clash, they collide, they are two ticking time-bombs though surely one will go out in a blaze of glory and the other—well, when a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, and all that Trost-region jazz.

It makes Eren’s oftentimes illogical unthinking radicalism an alluring obsession. It makes Eren’s ruthless revolutionary spirit something to envy, something to pine for, the way a stormy sky is at once terrifying and majestic and bewitching and freeing. Like the say about the trees, well, they also say men pine after what they lack, right?

Eren is a new breed of mercenary.

It drives Jean up a wall, either because he needs it or because he can’t process it or because it makes him want to be better when it would have been so much easier not to be.

Who had said that once, someone, some deep-thinker of decades ago in the literature lessons when school had still been relevant, who had said: _That which we fear fascinates us; that which enrages us completes us_. Speculative philosophy, tastes like denial.

Eren is blood promises, and suicidal bastardry, the alchemy of tragedy and hope and undiluted passion, and velveteen laughter of a voice ragged from screaming too much or screaming not enough, and Eren walks with a confidence that makes Jean’s stomach churn, he walks to the beat of an unheard song, he walks to the rhythm and sigh of all those he couldn’t save, wants to save.

He always walks this way.

He struts this maniac’s strut across the grounds; he waltzes this bold and brazen waltz to breakfast, to roll call, to lecture hall, to quad; he moves with such mystique and self-control like the wind moves through his dark hair, tousling it above his wild eyes, along his sun-kissed ears, his collar dancing at his throat, and Jean is spellbound. It takes everything in him to rip his gaze away and fix it on Conny instead, and Conny almost chokes on his potato and zucchini stew, looking back at Jean quizzically.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it your faith in humanity again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“God, you city guys are so weird sometimes…”

Eren is still on laundry duty from their scuffle in the quad last week. Instructor Pavel saw the fight and they both got extra chores and extra laps, but thankfully no points docked from their Trainee Profiles.

Jean seeks Eren out in the washroom, the long narrow barn-like barrack with the laundry line and wooden basins, washboards, crates labeled for each dormitory building. The lamplight is soft but dim in here; the floor is dusty and the tiny radio near the jars of soap has terrible reception but there’s something kind of jazzy drifting in and out from some district’s broadcasts.

Jean clears his throat. He knocks. He looks at Eren around a drooping parade of drying bed sheets and says, “I’m sorry.”

Eren tenses. He recognizes who’s visiting him. But he doesn’t look up. “For what?” he mutters.

“The kiss.” Jean lowers his voice and glances around warily, though they are alone. He knows they’re alone. He still wants to pretend it matters; it’s secret; it’s theirs and no one else’s, whether it’s good or bad.

Eren snorts. “Oh, I thought you were going to apologize for that really awful ‘your mom’ line the other day.”

Jean cringes; thankfully Eren doesn’t see it. “Yeah,” he mutters. “I’m sorry about that, too. You don’t have to forgive me for it.”

“I do.”

“Cool. And the kiss, too, I’m sorry—”

Eren stops and scowls down at the sudsy washboard, propped up against the side of the wooden basin. He looks deeply conflicted, distrusting. “I thought you liked Mikasa.”

Jean stumbles over the words. “I do. I mean, I did. I mean, I like her. But I’m not interested in her being my girlfriend.”

“Well, you’re all sorts of confused, aren’t you?”

“Can you stop ignoring me?”

“I’m not ignoring you.”

“Can you stop being an ass, then? I’m talking to you. I mean—I’m really _talking_ to you. Can you deal with that?”

Eren looks up, catches him with those blazing eyes without lifting his chin and God, it is a _haunting_ look. It is dark and daring and kind of unsettling, kind of suggestive, and he stands very slowly without breaking eye contact, lips parted and brow knotted. Jean cannot help but notice the way his shirt falls on his chest, his tight shoulders, the way the jut of his collarbone peeks out and the dark leather boots so perfectly accentuate his legs.

“I can deal with that,” Eren husks, voice low and kind of raw, and Jean is relieved to realize that Eren gets that he’s being serious. But suddenly, quite suddenly, Jean isn’t sure _he_ can deal with _Eren_ being serious. It’s a little daunting and fucking attractive—  

“I don’t really know what happened the other day,” Jean says thinly.

“I don’t either,” Eren counters.

Something had sparked in him the other day, on the Day Mission, the _kiss_. He can’t stop thinking about it. He doesn’t regret it.

Clearly it sparked something in Eren, too.

“Again, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“What,” Jean’s nose wrinkles, “you liked it?”

Eren fidgets a little, not quite enough to be obvious but enough to notice. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He finally looks away only to look back again with narrowed eyes and an indignant pout. “Yeah,” he grunts, matter-of-factly.

He is painfully shameless, Jean realizes. Disgraceor—no, insecurity and self-consciousness are not things he seems to be intimate with at all. He is himself, bold, undiluted, and it’s a little overwhelming but at the same time so God damn precious to Jean.

Jean’s mouth is dry. His heart is in his throat. His stomach has become a rampant breeding ground for vicious, violent butterflies and he just gawks for a moment, waiting for the punch line.

There is no punch line.

“…Me, too,” he finally confesses.

Eren’s eyes stay dark and a little cautious, but his mouth perks into a tiny, agreeable smile. “You smell good,” he whispers, like compliments are the logical next step of this awkward conversation.

Jean laughs; he doesn’t mean to. It’s partly because he’s all nerves and the taste of metal on his teeth. He cocks a brow, looking at Eren sideways. “What?”

Eren shrugs and goes back to his chore. He just turns his back on Jean, quite literally, but clearly not figuratively. Over his shoulder, try as he might to hunch low and hide it there, Jean can see his goofy smile and thinking eyes.

Neither of them discloses what this means— _liked it._ But Jean has never felt like he could breathe this easy before in his entire life.

* * *

Here they go, again.

The lounge of the West A Dormitory is full of voices and light and jumping feet and clapping hands; it’s a crude drumbeat as Mylius and Samuel do the northern swing-swing and Daz shows off the only song he knows on Conny’s _barbitos_. Fast song, cascading song, notes dipping and rising and dancing the higher octaves as Samuel and Mylius do the bows, elbows bent, down on one knee with the other leg outstretched, into the lindy hop as whoops and hollers echo with chants of, “Bounce, boys, bounce!”

Hannah and Franz Kefka are curled up on the loveseat closest to the stove; they are careful to move away from one another at any sign of a visiting instructor. Fraternization is, after all, a strike. This is not summer camp; this is military training. And it is not summer. It is almost the worst part of winter to be in the mountains.

Nac with his slicked-back hair, that smooth-talking pal of Jean’s, maybe they knew each other before enlisting, has a little set of strings like Conny, a tiny nyckelharpa, and together with Conny back on his folk guitar, the lounge is full of bouncing music. There goes Thomas Wagner and Daz with heel and palm percussion; Christa and Mina are dancing with military-issue scarves; in a rain of almost screeching high notes, Nac slides into the Southern Czarl’ston, and not everyone knows the Southern Czarl’ston, it’s far from the Utopian Waltz, but everyone’s dancing now and no one cares if everyone’s dancing different.

Eren knows the Czarl’ston. His dad taught him the Czarl’ston. Reiner knows some of the Czarl’ston too, and Marco, and Hitch, but Berthold keeps fucking Reiner up and even though Marco can swing Hitch pretty easy, no one is better at the Czarl’ston than Armin and Eren, and even Mikasa is clapping to the beat now, smiling, laughing, tossing pretty dark hair out of her eyes where she sits between Annie and Sasha on the back of a faded couch. Apparently Eren and Reiner are the only ones in the room who can successfully do the Czarl’ston low kicks.

“Faster, faster!”

“Ha ha!”

“Nice! Oh—”

Stomping, kicking, hand-in-hand, twirling, twisting—

Jean is somewhere between Mikasa and Nac, grinning, nodding, arms crossed and foot tapping. He has one hip cocked out to the side. He is cheering. He is whistling with both fingers between his teeth. When he laughs, he throws his head back and his knees bend a little, like he’s surrendering to the sound, the loud and genuine laugh, making little crescent moons of dark lashes out of his eyes and soft dimples out of his brows.  

No one is thinking about day missions or footwork drills, the ones the instructors are making them do with their eyes closed now; no one is worried about the weather or the ice making rock climbs difficult; no one is concerned about rumored food shortages or no coffee this weekend or the fabled mid-training Aptitude Trials coming up soon, obstacle courses in and out of maneuver gear, written exams, physicals; no one’s talking anymore about that Instructor Ferdinand who has finally been kicked out after so many reports of inappropriate behavior around 104th Block D Dormitories.

The room spins, spins as Eren swings, swings; the key from his father bounces on his throat and he is out of breath in a delicious way, kind of sweaty, kind of dizzy. And just like before, he turns. He turns, he meets Jean’s stare. He turns. He turns the other way.

Jean isn’t laughing anymore. Jean is dancing. Mikasa is dancing, too; she’s with Armin. And Jean is—

A tiny circle forms in the free space of the lounge, closest to the door, which someone has cracked for cool air. There is clapping and there are shouts of, “Oh, shit!” and “Here they go, again!” followed by “This oughta be good…”

It _is_ good.

It’s almost like a contest.

Jean knows the Northern Czarl’ston and all its fancy footwork. Eren sticks to the Southern with the kicks. It starts off with lots of eye contact, loud laughter, smirks and winks of challenging the worthy opponent. It starts off with them both dancing the solos. Jean spins out, half-squat, back up; he’s a master at the heel-toe taps and the most complicated Czarl’ston variations. His hair is messy from the action. It’s tousled and dancing at his brow and above his ears like bedhead, like sex hair, and Eren realizes he’s undone the first button of his off-gray shirt, he’s rolled up his sleeves, how long ago was that?

Triple step, shuffle, Northern versus Southern until the moves start to match near the middle, and quite suddenly Eren’s got Jean’s hand in his and Jean’s got his arm around Eren’s waist and he’s just going with it. One foot sweeps off the ground; half-side, half-side, no straddle. Jean lets go. Eren ducks, does the Southern shuffle, arms swinging, head cocked to the side, laughing, breathing hard, dropping to the low kick and then swiveling, swiveling, swiveling back in to trade the footwork off to Jean—

Eren’s ears are still ringing from the noise and the voices and the music, but there is silence.

Well, almost silence.

There’s the sound of the mountain wind and the rustling far-enough-away life of nature at night. Moonlight pours in through the high narrow windows of the tiny Wallist chapel behind the Chief Instructor’s office.

They snuck in under the black iron lantern on the crooked wooden stoop; they are only shadows in the night, far from the reaches of curfew or patrolling instructors. Nobody comes around this chapel, anyway. It smells like old incense and mold in here. The candles aren’t lit; they haven’t been lit for years, probably. The chapel is more a political nicety than anything sacred at all, cold dust and cobwebs and starlight scintillating off the gold leaf in icons of goddesses and old Wall-worshipping saints, and Jean’s fingers are swirling gently in Eren’s hair, massaging his scalp, sending chills shooting off from behind his ears and down his spine, and Eren’s breath is shivering on his lower lip as he tips his head back and drinks Jean’s nervous sigh off the tip of his tongue:

“What are we doing?”

Eren shrugs and shakes his head at the same time, lashes fluttering. His chest is rolling with his short breaths; he blames it on the dancing. They left the lounge and stole away here only five minutes ago, anyway. His heart is pounding. He blames that on the dancing, too, and the weak tickle in his muscles and the dizziness circling his head.

“I don’t know,” he whispers back. “I really don’t know…”

Truth is, they know what they’re doing. They’re kissing again.

Ah, the thrill of the forbidden…

Jean catches his mouth in his own once more, cupping his face, holding him there, pressed back tangled together in the shadows near the evaporated holy water.

Eren shuffles back, knocks into the miniature sacristy. He swears between his teeth; Jean chuckles and it makes Eren’s knees weak. He drapes his arms loosely around Jean’s shoulders. He doesn’t mean to be blasphemous, but he props one foot up on the small altar step, under the icons, stomps right on red velvet prayer pillows as his back arches to the shy fingers nudging at the small of his spine.

“Eren…”

Jean tastes sweet, so sweet. He smells just as sweet—in that soft, heady way of skin and hair and lower lips, clammy shaking hands, flushed cheeks and heaving chest. He is nervous. Eren is fucking nervous. They are a bundle of nerves.

“Is this okay? If I—you know—put my hand here—”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine. Is _this_ okay?”

“Yeah… That’s okay…”

“Am I using too much tongue?”

“No. Am I?”

“No…”

It’s pure in that there are no designs in it, no scheme, no thought for consequences or reason. Just kisses. Just careful hands. Slow, exploratory kisses, chins bobbing, heads nodding, noses bumping. This is accidental like the fights that cross lines and strike nerves, accidental like the random scattering of stars overhead into which people read the patterns they wish.

Eren is tingling, head to toe. He has never felt a rush like this before. His stomach is in knots. He feels sick, dazed. He is on fire and trembling cold at the same time, terrified of losing Jean’s body heat the moment he steps away. He is clinging to this chance encounter like it will never come again; who knows if it will come again?

He thought that the other day in the forest too, but—hey, look at them now.

Jean noses into Eren’s ear. Chills skitter down Eren’s spine like so many spiteful spiders, trailing their webs of surprise longing. Fuck. He is fucked. He is not going to be the same after this. He hasn’t been the same since the day mission. He hasn’t been the same since the first day roll call, a year and a half ago. The sea inside him is churning, turning, crashing—

“You’re really good at dancing,” Jean husks against the shell of his ear. Eren drags him closer. He wants to feel his heartbeat. He props his chin on Jean’s shoulder and rolls his eyes open, lets them roam the faded paintings of saints and goddesses.

“So are you,” he replies. “Who knew.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Heh. Nothing.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”  
  
“Laugh like that,” Jean mumbles into his neck, and it tickles, it makes Eren laugh again. Jean’s hand wanders up, gingerly covering his mouth; they can’t be too loud. They don’t want to draw attention to the neglected chapel.

“Why?” Eren whispers into Jean’s fingers.

“Because,” Jean whispers back grumpily, lips brushing his skin over and over. “It gets to me.”

They kiss a little more, tentatively, slowly, heads tipped to the side to accommodate. The faint smack of their lips every now and then makes Eren feel deliciously bad. They stop; they cleave together and relax. They stand as one shadow in the dark, like every angle, every curve, every breath needs to be memorized. Like they are each other’s only anchors to the moment and letting go means drifting apart, drifting away, losing control. Jean breathes deep and Eren exhales; Jean sighs and Eren breathes in. There is a strange intoxicating peace in this moment. There is something jarringly addictive about feeling someone else’s body—hot, strong, foreign, _alive_.

Voices erupt outside the chapel.

Everyone’s dispersing from the night’s socializing; everyone’s headed back to the proper dorm blocks.

“What time is it?” Jean whispers, cheek against Eren’s.

“I don’t know,” Eren murmurs.

“How long have we been here? Shit…”

“Don’t know.”

“Mikasa’s probably looking for you.”

“Probably.”

They unwind from each other; their fingers immediately twine together instead. Eren leads the way out of the chapel, slipping through the cramped chilly shadows and peeking out first to make sure they won’t be caught in the escape act.

Jean gives his hand a squeeze. His fingers drift up Eren’s wrist, tugging. Eren glances over his shoulder. Jean looks at him, eyes reflecting the moonlight. He’s got that half-cocked smirk, the one that betrays no underlying worry or insecurity, the one that made Eren fall for him that first day. _Pretty boy_. Motherfucker.

“I’m okay doing this,” Jean edges out, smile fading.

Heat blooms in Eren’s face; his breath hitches in his throat and he’s mad at first, mad that Jean can catch him so off guard like that, mad that Jean has the balls to address what they’re doing instead of leave it to the man code realm of secrecy.

“Whatever,” he spits, but he can tell by Jean’s half-hearted chuckle that Jean can see right through him even as he snatches his hand away and darts from the chapel.

He can feel Jean’s eyes following him from the dark as he rounds the corner into the lamplight of the quad and pretends he was part of the milling crowd all along.

The sea inside him is raging and he loves it.

* * *

There is no explanation for what’s going on. All right, so maybe there is, but it’s hiding, it’s buried somewhere deep down inside, but even with the explanation in hiding there’s still no explaining it _away_.

Instructor Euryl is a dummy. He is one of the easiest to dupe, let alone sneak away from during stable hours. Much like the horses he assigns each trainee for the competency drills—running, jumping, navigation from horseback—he doesn’t seem capable of seeing much more than what he’s looking at. At least he doesn’t kick when walked behind.

Eren swings up and onto his horse in a nearly perfect arc, digging his heels in the moment Euryl calls for their group to take off. The motion is seared into Jean’s mind. He sees it over and over again, galloping after Eren through the biting brumal air towards the forest—his tight fists, his mischievous grin, the stretch of his back and the taunting shape of his ass and thighs.

Reiner flanks to the left; Ymir and Franz and Daz and Thomas are staggered across to the right. Everyone wants to be the first back. This is like playtime compared to other drills.

But once crashing through the pines, Eren does not follow the path through towards the obstacle course set up a kilometer in where Instructor Euryl’s assistant Rinehardt waits. Rinehardt is even worse than Euryl. He will not notice that Eren veers off through the underbrush and over pinecone-blanketed humps, mossy trunks, monstrous ferns; he will not know that Jean follows with a sharp whistle like the call of an assassin to his partners, and the pounding hoof beats of their comrades fade away leaving just the crunching thunder of their two mares.

Some horses are bred especially for the military; they are lithe and powerful and cost as much as a poor man will make in his lifetime. These are not those horses. These horses are sleek and soft and easy. These horses don’t mind wandering the rolling almost-steppes the forest breaks into at the west, nibbling and stomping and snorting with their long reins tied together in the absence of posts, while Eren and Jean tumble down in the cool silky grass trying to soak up the heat of the rare sunshine before it really becomes winter gray and snow.

“Have you dated anyone before?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?” Pause. Flash of Eren’s eyes. Tactless. “A girl or a boy?”

Jean rolls his eyes, little half-grin. He’ll be sixteen in April; he can talk about these things. “A girl, asshole.”

“It’s a valid question.”

“Yeah. A girl.”

“And she didn’t want a soldier boy?”

“No. She wanted a banker’s son. I brought her flowers the day before I left for here and I found them making out.”

Eren’s smile falls and he blinks rapidly, gawking at Jean like he’s not quite sure whether to look sad or relieved. He is such a fucking madman but in the most harmless way. “I’m sorry,” he says awkwardly. Then, even more indelicately, he blurts, “So you decided to be with boys after she dumped you?”

Jean cringes if only because Eren is so utterly uncouth sometimes. No. All the time. “I never said I didn’t like boys, too, to begin with,” Jean edges out, rolling his eyes very slowly and deliberately in exasperation. He clears his throat. “Because I do. But what about _you_ , huh? Since this is suddenly honesty hour?”

Eren wriggles. It’s almost a fidget. “I’ve never _dated_ anyone…”

“But you’ve kissed before. Right? Jesus, Eren, don’t tell me I stole your first kiss—”

“What if you did?”

“Eren—?”

“Chill out. You didn’t pop my kiss cherry, you fairy tale motherfucker.”

“Yeah, well I’m sure you and Mikasa…”

“No.” Eren’s face is cold suddenly, a strange sympathetic but unforgiving sort of blank, like this suggestion is logical but somehow not one he ever expected despite his and Mikasa’s obvious closeness. “I could never,” he says flatly, unyielding. “Mikasa? No.”

“Really?”

Eren’s face softens—or rather, he retreats in on himself, and looks distant suddenly, distant and mysterious and terrifyingly unsalvageable. His voice, however, stays surprisingly conversational. “I could never do anything like that to Mikasa.”

 _I don’t like girls_ , he means.

 _I can’t be with a girl_ , he’s saying.

And Jean remembers suddenly everything he’s ever heard about Eren Jäger, the Shiganshina kid, from his own mouth, from others’ mouths, the Guy Who Saw the Titan, the Guy Who Will Kill Them All. And Jean is stricken suddenly by an awful dawning realization like a ringing in the ears just why Eren will not be with a girl. He does not feel worthy of it. Women, girls, they are holy to him, they are untouchable to him, he watched his mother be devoured by a titan and he killed three men to protect Mikasa and he does not deserve girls because he is afraid, maybe, of destroying them like he has seen so many others try to destroy the important girls in his life.

Or something.

Such a fleeting bead of deep analysis is both awesome and horrifying. And thank God it’s fleeting. It’s nothing new to Jean; he is a thinker, a dweller, a ruminater. It’s a curse and a strength and in this moment it stings him in the most tragic but longing way. He doesn’t want to think about Eren’s secret pains. He doesn’t know if he’s allowed yet—or if he’s even interested. He just wants to kiss. (He tells himself.)

It’s chilly out, but not when lying together.

The sky is a brittle blue; there are clouds blowing in from over the mountains but the sun still makes them squint. The wind tosses hair in and out of Eren’s eyes as he rolls up and onto his elbows at Jean’s side, brow knotted impatiently, lip curled, and cuts into the idle chitchat:

“Yeah, but what _is_ dating, anyway?”

A deep current of seemingly meaningless meaning forged in the crucible of painful mortal experience, maybe.

Distraction from looming existential crises, terror management, maybe. Or thanatophobia. Maybe.

(But what is an existential crisis for a teenager, shaving? Unbidden hard-ons? Loneliness? The great unknown world opening up to you only to snap its jaws on you? A desperate longing for life but haunting fear of _living_?)

Jean shrugs, really tempted to run his loosely-curled fingers up and down Eren’s arm, his wrinkled jacket, tight on his bicep and delt. But he is still too afraid of the contact; the electricity buzzing with just mere inches between them is already enough to get him blushing and nervous. He wants so badly to touch, taste, clutch, grind— God, he is either really lonely or hormones will be the death of him. So he doesn’t touch him. He lays with one arm flung out and the other folded beneath his head, and Eren on his elbows beside him, frowning down with the perfect dimple in his brow.

“Uhh…” Jean shrugs. Eren has a piece of grass stuck in his tousled hair, just above his ear. Jean can’t pet him, but he does pluck the grass away. “I don’t know. Kissing. Holding hands. Going on long walks and hurrying home before it gets too late so your folks don’t yell at you.”

“So it’s what you _do_ and not how you feel.”

“No, I didn’t say that…”

“I’m just trying to figure out if we’re dating,” Eren declares—with such lack of finesse, such want of fear or design, and yet so utterly suggestive that Jean is confused for a moment.

“No,” Jean sputters, somewhere between a defiant laugh and a snort of denial. But his cheeks burn red. And he can’t tell if Eren looks disappointed or not. “Dating? No. We’re in fucking boot camp, Eren.”

“But we kiss. And we held hands the other night—”

Why do they have to put it in words? Why do they have to untangle it and be responsible about it? Why can’t it just happen? Jean shrugs roughly, tossing his gaze elsewhere. Saying they aren’t dating makes it easier to just do things. _Dating_ outside this place— _dating_ in the real world—no, the old world—it’s kissing, yes, it’s holding hands, sure, it’s blushing and smiling stupidly and going on long walks in the gardens of Trost, ducking under trees and smelling flowers and drawing pictures of girls that crush your heart, it’s dreaming of sweet-smelling hair and hands that are not cut and sore from working in the era of ration cards and potential human extinction, marriage and family and—

Eren is quiet again. But Jean can feel the question sharpening the silence between them.

Are they dating?

Jean can’t. He just can’t. He braves the distance; he puts his hand on the back of Eren’s neck and his skin is so hot, so soft, hair tickling his knuckles, the tactile sensation burning him alive inside. He pulls Eren down and he cranes up and he kisses him—firmly, plainly, just a comfortable press of the mouths with the lips sealed seamlessly together like they’re meant to be that way, a sigh quivering at the tip of the tongue like so many stunted confessions.

He gives in to temptation. His hands wander. His fingers trace the stretch of Eren’s body, shirt twisting under his knuckles, tantalizing, taunting him with the fever-hot skin taut over obliques and abdomen and spine below. He can feel Eren’s heartbeat; he can feel his breath by the rise and fall of his belly. And they kiss. They kiss. Eren’s knee falls between Jean’s. His back arches to the touch; his brow knots at the slip of tongue.

“We need to get back,” he whispers against the corner of Jean’s mouth.

Jean grunts and nods and keeps his eyes closed, melting away into the taste and supple pop of Eren’s kisses.

Eren sighs. He has a short fuse. He tries to roll away but Jean holds him; it becomes wrestling. Playful wrestling, giggling rejection, and then real wrestling, and real snappy dismissal, and Jean is annoyed that Eren’s bottled-up rage and hair-trigger impatience can ruin the lazy lust with grappling arms and bruising elbows, fingers twisted together for dominance instead of delight. “ _Ow_ ,” Jean snorts when Eren quite intentionally knees him in the side and Eren mumbles, “Serves you right,” so Jean flips him easily and shakes his head as if to say, _What’s your deal all of a sudden?_

Eren scowls up at him where Jean’s got him pinned into the grass; one of the mares whinnies and stomps a little. She’s bored. She can wait a few more minutes.

“I don’t want to give it to you if you can’t tell me what it is,” Eren blurts indignantly, but it’s a lie. No, not a lie, just an honorable attempt at the usual stubbornness, but it fails miserably because Eren is just as addicted to this accidental chemistry of theirs, this fuzzy inexplicable heaven, and he can’t deny it. It’s a natural need.

Jean kisses him again and Eren yields, relaxing with a sigh into Jean’s lower lip, lashes fluttering shut and chin tipping to reciprocate. God, Eren drives him fucking mad.

But maybe Jean needs someone to drive him mad.

* * *

They make it to Rinehardt’s half of the course very late and very winded, very suspicious, but Rinehardt doesn’t know what group they were part of. Euryl does, however. Or he tries to know; he squints at them grumpily as they come back perfectly timed with a different wave of riders so as not to seem out of place, but he says nothing. He says nothing about how close Eren stands to Jean as Jean swings off his horse, talking together, low and clearly private, as they move off to return the mares to the stables, get them to some water.

Maybe there’s an eye-roll or a scoff of, “What the fuck are _they_ up to now?” from any one member of their beloved competition audience, waiting for their turn to run the course at the start of Euryl’s stopwatch.

Oh, they have no idea.

* * *

**end ch. ii**

 


	3. all in white

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The holiday season is upon the world and the 104th military trainees are allowed down into Trost for the festivities. Petals fill the streets; a giant paper titan puppet is burned in town square. It will snow soon. Jean's mother embarrasses him. Eren doesn't find this fair. Too much mulled wine and buttered rum, and fingers slip in a Trost alleyway. Jean doesn't mind Eren sneaking into his bunk at night, so long as nobody knows. Eren wonders if his mother would have used his having a boyfriend as a reason for him not to join the Survey Corps. Also, Marco breaks his ankle and Conny talks in his sleep. Sex. There is finally sex in this chapter.

iii. ALL IN WHITE

* * *

 

Eren is late into fifteen. He will be sixteen at the end of March. He is one part brash outbursts, one part visionary passion, two parts stupid boy. He doesn’t have a mother; maybe his father’s out there. This doesn’t really make him special. There are a lot of trainees without parents. Though he does wear it on his sleeve and maybe that’s why people use it against him.

Jour des Morts is coming up and at this point in training, they are less bumbling kids and more almost-soldiers. The drop-outs have dropped out; the weak have expired. Winter is pretty much here and the 104th is honored by being asked to help with the military festivities in none other than nearby Trost.

It’s the first real holiday in two years, so it’s easy to pretend holidays aren’t hard.

And they are. They are, because Eren remembers strings of popcorn and cranberries in the little house on the cobbled hill in Shiganshina. He remembers sweet cider stinging his tongue, steam tickling his eyes. He remembers chopping real firewood with his father, not the sticks and kindling of summer hearths he and Mikasa would gather on their backs. He remembers holly greens and red velvet table cloths, and gifts from his father’s patients of fresh sweet fruit and rye bread and fat candles and cinnamon sticks to dip in chocolate drinks; he remembers curling up near the stove in a blanket and reading books and telling ghost stories, sneaking sips of his mom’s mulled wine when he thought she wasn’t looking (she was), cutting out paper dolls with Mikasa that they usually ended up playing with more than decorating the windows with. Jour des Morts, and after it the winter festival Koliada with the carols and candied nuts and gold coins with the goddesses pressed into them. Eren can still remember very clearly the first Koliada Mikasa was with him. She’d never caroled before. She’d cried halfway through a song about the Unconquered Sun and Eren and Armin had insisted on taking her home but she’d refused, standing her ground, explaining as the tears and snot ran down her rosy wind-nipped face, “I’m just having so much fun!”

Mother, father, family—

As they rattle into Trost from the northeast, Eren grins and leans next to Armin, saying, “You know we can finally drink at Jour des Morts now.”

Armin shivers with a theatrical excitement, rubbing his cold hands together in fleece-lined mittens. “I’m going to drink mulled wine until I’m sick!”

“Don’t do that,” Mikasa murmurs from his other side. “Please don’t do that.”

“Don’t worry,” Eren promises, “I’ll hold Armin’s hair back when he gets sick.”

“Yeah.” Mikasa sighs. “And I’ll be holding _your_ hair back, won’t I?”

“My hair’s not that long.”

“That’s not my point.” But Mikasa smiles, rolling her eyes. “Whatever, you two. I don’t want mulled wine, though. I want some good beer.”

Eren and Armin exchange a glance, then burst into loving laughter at Mikasa’s hardcore tastes.

Jour des Morts is the annual day of the dead, loved ones long-lost to the siege of titans honored by candles and ritual. There are banners hanging in the streets of Trost, flapping from wrought-iron balconies of jettied white wattle and daub houses, belching wood fire smoke from the chimneys in their pitched slate roofs. The festival’s purple foxglove litters the cobblestone, swept along by the wind with fallen leaves as autumn dies into winter. But there’s only a lace of frost in the morning, not much else yet; though surely when they return to the mountain military camp there will be snow on the ground there.

Up flagstone steps to the city hall they march, led by instructors, but they are like children on a field trip. They are all galvanized and impatient and buzzing with curiosity. The 104th has not seen normal life in how many months now?

Music is echoing from Trost cafés; voices ebb and flow from main thoroughfares and marketplaces. The walls loom in the distance, protective, unbreached. It is a comfort to Eren. It is familiar. It is nostalgic. The sunset is early but it lasts for hours, the sun disappearing beyond the stretch of the walls but the light lingering, lingering, until the zenith of the sky is a velvety blue and the constellations are peeking out to say hello.

Funny, how life can seem so unthreatened again when all humanity comes together to celebrate a few holidays.

It is in this long, rectangular city hall that they will have their disbanding ceremony in just less than a year. City hall is bursting at the seams with local military personnel and Trost’s elite—bankers, doctors, state officers, those Garrison not mandated to stay on guard for the night (they take turns yearly), Military Police in the area, a handful of Corps members down from HQ. Eren is giddy. He stands at salute with the rest of the 104th in the courtyard behind city hall, listening but not listening to Instructor Shadis—“You’re working tonight, not partying. You’d better impress your superiors. Trust me, I’ll hear about it. Check in with Instructor Dovich for your assignment for the night. Good behavior might mean early release so you can enjoy the festivities. Understood?” Yeah, yeah, Eren is on his tiptoes like he was three years ago, he wants to see the Survey Corps, he’s searching the crowd inside for flashes of green and blue and silver, he wants to see Captain Levi, maybe he can even talk to him now that he’s not some snot-nosed brat in the jeering sobbing crowds clotted at the gates—

Eren does not get to see the Survey Corps members down from HQ. Begrudgingly, quite unhappily, he is assigned to back kitchen duty, grumbling to himself as he pulls on sheepskin mittens and a knit cap to keep warm as the daylight drains away and he moves crates of food around from delivery carts to the open kitchen. Jean is in the kitchen, with Sasha and Conny and Armin. Armin offers him sips of spicy steaming wine for each trip; they snicker together over the little mug. Jean ignores Eren’s deliberate glances and all their suggestion. Eren gives up eventually, rolling his eyes.

After all the crates have been moved, Instructor Vaughn relocates his little group of working trainees to the storage facilities behind city hall where they start moving crates of supplies and sandbags for the Garrison, instead. God fucking damn it.

The military feast is in full-swing. Lights spill out of city hall; music and cheers echo from the streets down below.

Eren thinks about his mother, his father, family.

He sneaks back into the kitchen where so many trainees are cooking like their lives depend upon it—potatoes, stewed greens, roasted meat—for another ladle of Armin’s mulled wine and the kitchen doors fly open and bang back against the plaster walls hard enough to echo even above the roar of voices from the banquet hall.

It is Jean. He looks vicious and volatile. He spots Eren and decides he’s the perfect place to channel the cresting feelings that so clearly require an outlet. He jabs a finger and snaps, “What the fuck are you doing in here, Jäger? This isn’t your assignment.”

“Woah!” Eren rears back, instantly on familiar defensive. “Excuse me, Captain Perfect, sorry for breaking the rules—”

“Yeah. Thank you. Now get out and go back to your job.”

“Jean, what the hell?”

“Jean—” Armin tries to come between them, obviously knowing Jean will be easier to defuse. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I—my mom came to see me.”

“Your mom?” Eren echoes.

“How nice!” Sasha chirps from the stove, though her eyes are wide and her face pinched in uncertainty.

“No, not nice,” Jean parries, “she’s so embarrassing—I just—I wish she’d never come—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Eren snarls. “Do you know what I’d give to have my mom visit me tonight?”

True, it’s cruel; it’s unfair of him; but he can’t stop it and he doesn’t know why. It just bubbles over like the boiled vegetables when Sasha spins at the shouting, eyes widening more and brows downturned. Conny drops a slice of meat on the floor.

“So go light a fucking candle for her,” Jean fires back.

Eren spits, “Your _mom_ came to see you and you called her _embarrassing!_ ”

“She _is!_ This is a military event! She can’t just barge in calling for her ‘baby boy—’”

“You’re the most pretentious selfish son of a bitch I’ve ever met—”

“Oh please, Eren, don’t start with that shit again.”

Nobody is interjecting now. Everyone seems to understand on some level that this is something far more personal and privately pained than any of the infamous Kirschtein-Jäger feuds. But something has been loosed between them, between Jean’s insecurities and unvoiced guilt, and Eren’s martyred rage.

“What did you do, huh, mamma’s boy?”

“What? What do you mean, what did I do?”

“After Maria was breached. And the taxes skyrocketed, and the shortages happened, and—did you work or did your mommy take care of you?”

“I _worked_ , thank you very much— _with_ my mother—”

“Yeah, I worked, too. You wanna know what Idid _without_ my mother?”

Armin’s fingers bite into Eren’s arm and Eren chokes on a breath, brought back down to rationality quite violently by Armin’s wide, angry blue eyes. “ _Eren_ ,” he says between his teeth. “ _Don’t_.”

Tears are burning the backs of Eren’s eyes. He is livid. He cannot figure out if the bruising weight of shame crystallizing with helpless fury is at himself or actually at Jean. He rips loose of Armin’s hand and storms out of the kitchen, leaving Jean standing there, with his sad eyes, with the others, cold and fragile in the ringing silence. He wants to believe Jean looks broken-hearted as he leaves. He hates himself because he did the breaking this time around.

Jean is wounded and defeated in ways Eren doesn’t understand and it drives him crazy but God, it sharpens his attraction, his itching need to be with and protect and make Jean part of him—

Trost is the southernmost district now, after the fall of Maria. It feels like mockery or perhaps spite or maybe even desperate ritual, the parade in the streets with the “titan” puppet made of paper and straw, being walked by stilts and poles to the center of the city to go up in flames as the Burning Man, as government bells ring out and people sing old songs and toast sloshing tankards of beer and spiced wine.

Eren miserably wipes hot tears from his eyes, sitting on the flagstone wall at the base of city hall’s steps. Shadis was kind and dismissed them all early; maybe he’d planned it from the start. A mug of hot buttered rum warms Eren’s palms and the tears are the worst kind, just burning, burning him, never enough to actually fall but enough to tingle in the bridge of his nose and keep the world shivering in his lashes, throat raw, chest tight. They’re setting the paper titan aflame now. Purple petals swirl on the streets in the little bit of early winter wind.

Mikasa finds him.

She sits down and wraps the red scarf around both of them at once. It smells like her. She wants a sip of his drink. He gives her the rest. The rum and the wine is only making him more emotional.

 _Jean._ Their fights have worsened as they’ve gotten comfortable with each other, because they are more comfortable with each other and the walls come tumbling down.

“Where’s Armin?” Eren asks, pretending Mikasa cannot see he is upset, that she does not know what happened like everyone else in the 104th probably knows what happened by now.

“He went with Jean to see Jean’s mom,” Mikasa says quietly.

“Oh.” Eren shrugs.

“Don’t be so hard on him, Eren,” Mikasa reproves, and it hurts more than anyone else’s lecturing because she means it from the very bottom of her heart and she says it so finely, so firmly. “Not everyone is like you and that’s okay. It’s not your job to police other people. You need to…say sorry to him. I can’t take you anywhere, can I?”

Something hangs on the air between them.

She knows.

Mikasa knows.

She knows about them—him, and Jean. And that leaden silence is all it takes for Eren to realize that. The festival crowds are singing. “To our dead, to our dead!” Flashes. Flashes of red, red like more flowers, raining down, crushed timber and roof, broken-up cobbles. Beating on Hannes’s back to let him go, let him get back to her, let him get his mother— In the square, children wave painted wooden dolls and pinwheels.

“Let’s go light candles for my mom, and your parents,” Eren husks out, wrapping an arm around Mikasa’s waist.

She kisses his cheek and runs her fingers through his hair like his mother used to.

* * *

It just hurt him to see her.

It hurt Jean to see her there, for her to see him there—his mother—for her to look so nervous and happy. It scared him to see her alive and well because knowing she is alive and well underscores the fact that she might not be one day. It brings slamming back memories of contemptible childhood innocence, of the world that was, of the fragility of happiness and peace. It makes him feel weak. And the real reason he yelled at her when she called him by nickname in front of his comrades, his superiors, his fellow soldiers—it was because he’d wanted to cry for all the nostalgia and comfort, and after all, the easiest way to avoid being weakened by feelings is to avoid feelings altogether.

He told her all these things, while Armin waited patiently in the tiny kitchen of the house where Jean had grown up. He told her in the sitting room, apologizing over and over and not even caring that she couldn’t hug him right anymore because he was too tall.

He is so terrified of caring for someone.

He is terrified of losing them.

Keeping them at arm’s distance is so much safer.

His mom forgave him, though. She said, “You’re too much like your father,” and Jean blew a kiss to his father’s ashes, which still sit, apparently, in the corner on a pretty doily, under the tri-icon of the goddesses.

He marches now with Armin at his side through the darkled streets of Trost, lit by lanterns and windows like glowworms bobbing in the night, back up towards the square where the puppet titan is up in flames. Its painted face melts away, its straw hands crumble down in smoldering heaps.

There’s Hannah and Franz, kissing passionately in the crowd.

Reiner’s got Annie on his shoulders, Annie staring grimly at the burning titan and Reiner clapping, hollering, while Bert cheers quietly beside them both.

There’s Thomas with his brothers, and Marco and Conny with Nac, Mina, Mikasa— _Eren_.

Jean curls his fingers in Eren’s jacket, dragging him off away from the crowd. Eren lets out a tiny yelp before realizing it’s Jean, and then a shadow falls over his face, a dark but yielding scowl, and no one goes after them as Eren shakes Jean’s hand off. But he follows. He follows Jean’s lead into a nearby alley.

It is dark. The buildings shield from the festival lights here. A cool breeze drifts through; a crooked Jour des Morts banner hangs limp from a closed window. The alley is cramped and crooked. A cat scurries away, off into the darkness. And Jean pushes Eren up against the chipped brick, next to a locked arched door.

Eren sputters. He’s bristled, ready for the fight. He can’t get more than a breath and unintelligible half an exclamation out before Jean grabs him by the chin and kisses him hard. Little bit of force, little bit of apology, little bit of accidental teeth—

A breathless whimper escapes Eren’s throat and Jean _feels_ the surrender flowing through him. Eren gives way with a quiet trusting resignation. His face is flushed, he tastes like rum and wine spices and fiery indignation, but he clings. He clings so tight. He groans through his teeth, “I’m really sorry—” and Jean rolls the words up into his mouth with a frantic tongue.

“It’s fine,” he whispers back. “Shh, it’s fine…”

“I’m sorry—I’m really, really sorry, Jean—”

“Babe, it’s okay…”

Eren is a crybaby. Or he’s drunk. Or both. He makes no effort to conceal his torment. But Eren is not the kind of crybaby who weeps for his own gain; he is the kind of crybaby whose tears are never impetuous, never undignified. His tiny sobs of useless fury and guilt screw up his face as Jean tries to kiss him, kiss this all away.

Why is Jean driven to this like an alcoholic to the drink? He burns inside from the nasty things Eren said; he aches to get even. But here he is drinking down Eren’s mewling moans with each kiss, and why is this his comfort, why is this the remedy? Maybe because he knows Eren of all is the safest place to break. Eren is, somehow, in all this insanity, _clarity_.

Eren is everything he needs, everything he wants—because he is everything good Jean’s not.

Lust throbs it’s ancient and unchanging tune through Jean’s veins. They have never kissed like this before, this desperately, this roughly, this uncontrollably. Eren’s chest rolls with his frantic breaths; he locks his arms around Jean’s shoulder and kisses back, fast, sloppy. They are deep enough in the alley to go unseen. People pass, shadows flickering over them, two faceless figures tangled and rocking together like sprites of passion in the night. And rocking they are, hips knocking, sparks of sex appeal jumping. All this touching, all this closeness, is almost unendurable it is so satisfying, a sensory symphony, miracle of texture and heat and feeling. This is dangerous, this subtle golden pulse of desire. Gasps and tongue and clutching, groping, pulling hands between them, stuttering heartbeat. This is escalating, cresting, but when it breaks Jean has no idea what it will break into—

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eren groans, voice jumping, dragging the first letter out into a therapeutic hiss. His head is tossed back. His eyes are squeezed shut, brow knotted; the tears have tried in sticky tracks down his face. They taste like salt when Jean catches them under his lips. “Fuck,” Eren says again, like he’s short-circuiting in this hot and heavy collision. “Fucking touch me, Jean—”

He knows he’s forgiven.

The vicious butterflies are back in Jean’s gut, and boy do they shuck and jive at this demand. He utters a low groan, helpless, hopeless, and Eren pops his eyes open and looks at him like he’s startled. But he’s not startled. He’s just as defenselessly turned on and when Jean grabs him between the legs, he practically melts back into the brick in a deluge of shudders.

He’s hard, definitely. He’s kissing and gnawing and kissing some more at Jean’s ear, his cheek, his lips, his neck, anywhere he can get his mouth as Jean fumbles with the belt and zipper at the front of his white uniform pants.

Maybe a minute or a little longer is all it takes.

Ah, sexual frustration.

And Eren’s so _fucking loud_ when he comes, trying to choke back innocent moans. Jean claps a hand over his mouth, hissing in his ear, “Damn it, Eren, come on!” Eren’s come is all between his fingers. It is warm and then it is cold already and _Jesus Christ, he’s just jacked Eren off_ …

Eren’s eyes flash with a dazed and dulled-down version of his usual flagrancy. Through his teeth he growls, “Kiss me,” and the kisses are deeper now, full of twisting teasing tongue and open-mouthed gasps. They’re careless now; they’re side orders to the main course and the main course is Eren’s fingers coiling on Jean’s dick.

Maybe he outlasts him by fifteen seconds or so. _Maybe_. Jean’s not keeping track. His head is spinning. Eren’s still kissing him but Jean’s just pleading into his mouth, knees buckling. “Shit—shit—Eren, oh fuck—oh my God… Oh _God_ …”

He manages to kiss Eren back while the orgasm pulses through him and out of him, hopes to drown the moans in Eren’s mouth. The pleasured heat runs through him in chills. It is like the first orgasm all over again, all-consuming and utterly galvanizing. He hasn’t jacked off in a few weeks, after all. Eren pulls his hand out of Jean’s undone pants. He wipes it off on his jeans just inside the top of his boots. He throws his arms around Jean and clings again, hiding his face in Jean’s shoulder.

They rock together again, breathing hard—but slowly, sweetly, just swaying side to side, calming their hearts and their gasps.

Eren seems deeply impressed by Jean’s show of confidence. He peeks at him through his dark hair, not really lifting his face. Still panting a little, he whispers, “So are we dating?”

Jean wants to say, “Are you fucking kidding me right now, Jäger?” He doesn’t. He leans on the brick with Eren in his arms and he runs his parted lips across Eren’s forehead over and over, closing his eyes.

“Promise me no more temper tantrums like earlier,” Jean husks. “And I’ll say ‘yes.’”

Eren is quiet for a long time. Jean wonders if he’s waiting for him to say _yes_. But then he realizes he’s gauging this ultimatum very seriously. He draws a breath and mumbles honestly, “I can’t promise that.”

Jean perks into a weak little smirk, resting his head against Eren’s. “…Yes,” he answers anyway, whether Eren promised or not.

* * *

It snows in the mountains, and the snow becomes ice, and ice makes training all the more perilous.

Marco Bodt breaks his ankle.

Jean has cracked ribs before; he’s bruised up his shins enough times not to feel it anymore. Eren’s had a concussion or two, and Armin’s dislocated his arm, and Sasha was out for a week once after she landed wrong right on her tailbone. But Jean’s never _broken_ anything, and he’s never spent this long in the infirmary. It’s a little intimidating.

He sat and held Marco’s hand when they set his ankle for the brace—or rather, he let Marco squeeze his hand until the bones shifted a little, his head thrown back and hair sticking to his skin with sweat, face contorted with bitten-back announcements of pain. The medic said, “It seems like a pretty clean break. It should heal fast. But it’s going to take a few months.”

“Is it going to delay my graduation?” Marco asked in an almost-wheezing voice, chin dimpling like he was trying not to cry as Shadis oversaw the procedure like he oversees all important decisions in the camp.

“No,” Shadis averred. “You’ve got great scores. Just heal, and heal properly, or the king won’t have any use for you when you join the MP.”

Marco is still a little starry-eyed from this remark, doped up on rationed pain meds and smiling giddily at the books and wrinkled old magazines Jean brought from his dorm.

“You think I’m in the top ten?” he asks Jean.

“Maybe right now,” Jean grunts. “Just heal, okay?”

“Hey, Jean…”

Jean’s eyes flicker up to meet Marco’s; he’s flopped back on a bank of pillows, looking foggy-eyed but smiling his usual freckled sunshine. “What?” Jean replies.

“Are you fucking Eren?”

Jean freezes and for a moment the whole world stops spinning. There is no sound, only the steady drum of his nervous heart in his ears. Marco raises his brows, slowly, very slowly. That drugged smile stays on his face. There is nothing unkind about it.

“I don’t…” Jean shakes his head and holds his hands out, open. “No?” he says, frowning at Marco and trying to play off the shock like utter discomfiture and betrayal at such a rumor. _Rumor_.

“You guys are just pretty buddy-buddy lately.”

“Maybe we’ve overcome our differences.”

“Jean, come on. We’re all mature responsible adults here.”

This is relatively true. Maybe they’re not _adults_ per se, but they certainly aren’t _children_ anymore. Low conscription age is a necessary evil; skipping Neverland and recruiting just out of puberty means a chance at a better life for masses of citizens, and less mouths to feed for the government should a better life never come.

“I’m not fucking him,” Jean says, which is quite honest, all things considered.

Marco’s eyes widen a little; his smile fades away gently and he stares at Jean in sudden seriousness. The pain meds are really working wonders on him, poor guy. He whispers completely without cunning:

“You haven’t told him about…when we kissed, have you?”

_Have you dated anyone before?_

_A girl._

So Jean had conveniently neglected divulging a secret exploratory kiss or two with Marco during the first few weeks of training. They didn’t _date_ ; they didn’t do anything more than kiss a little and sigh and stare at each other. And it was all loneliness and the culture shock of boot camp, clinging stupidly to familiar normalcy. _Hey, you’re cute. Want to kiss?_ It was childish and clumsy, and after the first half a year of training the cutesy flirting and occasional kisses behind the mess hall had faded like a summer fling—expiration date. Temporary. Had to get it out of the system. Growing up happened a lot faster in this camp than outside in the real world. Marco hadn’t been upset about it; Jean hadn’t been upset about it. It had just stopped as inexplicably as it started and they were good friends, anyway, what did it matter? There wasn’t room for romance in training to save the world. At least, not back then, apparently…

God but if Eren finds out, Jean has no idea what to expect. _This is different_ and _that was a while ago_ only have so much power even when they are the truth.

“What makes you think I’m even doing anything remotely like that with him?” Jean grumbles, leaning closer. But there’s no one else in the infirmary right now; all right, so there’s Mina, whose asthma’s been irritated by a bad case of bronchitis, but she’s passed out on the other end of the wing. “Marco—”

“ _Because_.” It’s all he says, with a roll of his puppy-dog eyes. He sighs, patiently. “You’ve always been sort of obsessed with him.”

“I’m—I’m not _obsessed_ with him—”

“I won’t tell him.” Marco nods with saintly resolve, and the smile is back, reassuring. “You’re a damn good kisser, anyway. But that’s what everyone says about kissers from Trost.”

Jean laughs, snorts. He glances down the line of beds at Mina, hoping he didn’t wake her. She’s fine. “What does _that_ mean?” he drawls. But he knows. There’s plenty of talk about the south-central city—er, the southernmost city, now. Almost a century ago the city’s economy had been kickstarted by prostitutes. But after that the factories and trade routes finally picked up and modern-day jokes absorbed the shady history.

“You just better be careful, Jean,” Marco whispers, closing his eyes and sinking into his pillows. The pain meds are starting to pull him under. “You guys are gonna get caught if you’re not careful…”

Jean doesn’t really have anything to say to that. It’s touching, it’s nice to have a friend who really has his back like this. The friends back at home, back in Trost—they were never really _friends_. And it’s touching, sure, but a little foreboding. Plus, Marco’s groggy and medicated. Jean doesn’t take it too much to heart beyond filing it away for later that _someone knows about him and Eren_ and he should probably address this somehow, sometime.

For now he just smiles a little, watching Marco fall asleep. He brushes dark hair out of his eyes before he leaves, and he leaves his favorite book behind for Marco to read when he wakes up.

* * *

God, Eren has never felt more typical and gross, head over fucking heels. He’s suddenly noticing all these meaningless little things about Jean—the way he stands, the way he walks, the way he gestures, the way he twists his tongue between his teeth when he’s concentrating, the way he tosses his hair out of his eyes and stretches his shoulders and runs his thumb over his knuckles idly, like he needs to crack them, but it’s more like a nail-biting habit than anything else.

He is a lot of nervous habits, Eren realizes. Tossing things back and forth in his palms, playing with buttons, raking his hands through his hair over and over while his eyes roam his surroundings, looking but not really seeing. And he clears his throat funny, too. And when there are mushrooms involved at dinner, he always picks them out. Sasha steals them promptly.

 _Pretty boy_ was the understatement of the year during that very first roll call.

Luckily, Eren does not have to skip dormitory buildings to sneak into Jean’s bed. Jean is on the first floor of West Block C. Eren follows the shadows down the stairs, holding his breath with each creak of the floorboards under his bare feet.

He scampers into the second room on the left in the lower hall, a room stacked tightly with maybe seven sets of double bunks, wood-burning stove in the center with its stack jutting up through the ceiling. Someone’s snoring. Someone else is talking in their sleep. Outside in the dark, blackbirds call. A lantern is cold and unlit on the long table near the stove.

Eren slips to the bunk he knows to be Jean’s, grabbing hold of the side of the top and launching himself up with a tiny bounce off the bottom bunk.

Jean snorts awake and vaguely alert but Eren is already diving under his blankets with him, pressing his icy toes to Jean’s warm calves.

“What the actual hell!” Jean sputters, a slurred mess of grunts and whispers. He waits. Eren waits. Someone in the bunk next to Jean’s tosses and turns and then joins the first snorer. They’re in the clear.

Jean is a little more cognitive now, yanking his blankets up to keep Eren hidden.

“I’m cold,” Eren whispers.

“So why aren’t you snuggling up to your _real_ bunkmate,” Jean grumbles against his cheek.

“Because,” Eren mouths back on Jean’s ear. He feels Jean shiver. He smiles, winding an arm around Jean’s side, pressing closer, seeking body heat. Their forms fold perfectly together. Jean’s foot wags idly and he covers his face with one arm, sighing very quietly through his teeth. But Eren can tell in his voice that he doesn’t truly mind the rule-breaking invasion of personal space.

“Eren, God damn it,” he murmurs, “if someone sees you…”

He doesn’t really mean the fraternization policy. He doesn’t mean curfew. He means his roommates, his bunkmates, their peers—if they see Eren, they’ll know. If they see Eren, it will spread like wildfire. If they see Eren…

They lay together in the quiet. Jean’s breathing steadies again. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. Eren tries to memorize the silhouette of his face, the line of his nose and the part of his lips, the way his fingers curl limply somewhere in Eren’s hair and the way his body feels, strong and hot and _real_ under Eren’s arm and leg. If he shifts his knee a little, he runs the risk of nudging Jean’s crotch. It’s kind of tempting. It feels kind of deliciously dangerous to be so close to the outline of his dick and not mean anything by it. _Man_. This is another young man, hard muscles and square jaw and treasure trail descending down into his shorts. _Human_. Heartbeat and breath and fiery life. The smell of Jean’s hair and skin fill him, intoxicate him. He lets his eyes close a little and he tips his head up after a moment, whispering low and close against Jean’s shoulder:

“If my mom was alive or my dad was around, they’d fucking love you.”

Jean isn’t asleep; he responds immediately, a silent chuckle and even more silent smirk. He moves his arm from his face just enough to cast Eren a playful glance that gets Eren’s heart jumping for joy. No dwelling on tragedy or life’s scars here; no wallowing allowed. Not in the dark, not in the moonlight. They can be as honest as they dare to be in the moonlight. It’s a lot easier, anyway, when you can barely see each other.

“Why do you say that?” Jean half-mouths back.

“Because you hate the Survey Corps.”

“I don’t _hate_ the Survey Corps. I think it’s fucking suicidal to join them.”

“But it’s not. Captain Levi isn’t dead yet—”

“ _Yet_.”

“—and they have successful missions too, you know.”

“But have you noticed only the higher-ups always come back fine?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not the higher-ups that die on expeditions.”

“Well, why do you think they’re higher-ups?”

“Oh my God, never mind.” Jean scrubs at his face groggily. He turns; his bed creaks. They both freeze, hardly breathing, nose to nose and waiting for someone to realize there are one too many people in Jean’s bunk. There is only the same silence as before, two ribbons of snoring soldiers and a sleep-talker. Someone else coughs. Jean flops his arm around Eren’s side, relaxing. Eren follows suit.

“So you think your folks would like me, huh?” Jean whispers, and his breath tickles Eren’s lips, he is that close. Eren nods, craning forward half an inch or two, running his mouth back and forth along Jean’s. His lips are so warm and silky. It’s like a butterfly kiss, but without the lashes.

“Yeah,” Eren mouths. “I think they would.”

“You’d bring me home to dinner?”

“I would.”

“What would your mom make?”

“Probably chicken kiev.”

“Oh, that sounds really good, actually…”

“With dumplings. Fried in oil.”

“What would she say?”

“She’d say, ‘Take your shoes off. Take as much bread as you want—’”

“No, I mean about you bringing home a man.”

Eren blinks a few times, face pinching. “You think she’d have a problem with you being a guy?”

Jean shrugs, raising his brows slowly. He doesn’t say anything else.

Eren clears his throat and shifts; Jean’s arm falls down his side to rest at his hip, fingers massaging the naked skin there where his shirt’s slipped up and away from his shorts. It’s comforting. It gives Eren shivers, makes his nipples hard and his gut knot up with that same strange adrenaline rush Jean always gives him—the sea, the sea inside, sloshing and swirling and sudsing.

This is a little too much, maybe; this is getting dangerously close to crossing a line and bringing _life_ into the mix when it’s really just fooling around. Fooling around and getting _life_ involved is just asking for disaster, for unnecessary hardship and complication. It’s like wearing your fatal flaw across your forehead.

“Well…” Eren snuggles closer, sighing through his nose. “I guess maybe she’d ask me all about it and then my dad would want to know if we’re doing things in a safe way. Doctors just always know about that shit. You know?”

Jean nods. Now he’s falling asleep. His fingers are slowing, but they’re still circling at Eren’s side. Eren trails his fingers through Jean’s hair, like his mom used to do to him when he was younger. “And she’d ask you all about your family, and how we met. Maybe she’d say Mikasa has to chaperone us. Maybe she’d ask me if I’d ever liked girls, and if not why I’d never told her… That I can tell her anything. That she loves me no matter what, even though I’m a little shit and I drive her crazy. That maybe hopefully having a boyfriend will keep me from joining the Survey Corps. You’d freak out if you’d gotten to meet her, Jean. I look so much like her. I got my temper from her…”

Jean is dreaming.

Eren doesn’t want to go to sleep. Jean will probably be angry at him if he stays, but he doesn’t want to go. He wants this lazy loving quiet to last forever. But his eyes are heavy and he’s comfortable and he’s warm, and Jean’s fingers have fallen still but his hand is still on his side. He’ll just close his eyes for a few; that’s all.

* * *

Jean kicks him around four-thirty in the morning and hisses, “Get back to your bunk before roll call, jerk!”

Eren tries really hard not to make a lot of noise but it doesn’t work very well. It is pitch black outside, but there are birds chirping. Jean hides under his blankets. Conny says, “Hey, Eren!” from his bunk. And then Conny’s snoring again.

“ _Go_ ,” Jean mouths from his bed.

Eren flips him off. Jean returns the gesture with a nasty face. They speak the same language.

* * *

**end ch. iii**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm having a lot of fun playing with fleshing out the snk world in this, i'm sure you can't tell at all lol. last chapter i wonder how many people caught on to the dancing bits?? :) 
> 
> "jour des morts" is literally just "day of the dead" in french or something, and "koliada" is actually a pre-christian slavic winter festival, parts of it were integrated into christmas, if i remember correctly it was to worship the sun deities


	4. oats in the water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are playing with fire. But it is man's nature to laugh in the face of danger. Getting slammed with laundry duty just means Eren has a key to the laundry barracks, so sneaking around is a hell of a lot easier. And Eren never means it like he says it, while Jean never says it like he means it. Marco is second-in-command but Jean still needs to let himself be a leader.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some of these chapters i end up naming after a particular song stuck in my head while writing or editing. soooo yeah lol "oats in the water" by ben howard. it's good.

iv. OATS IN THE WATER

* * *

 

God, he just wants to _touch him_.

There is something just so unfair about Eren’s body; it’s perfect.

He’s still soft and innocent in some places, but so hard and dangerous in others. He is entering the first stage of a man’s prime, the one where youth clings at the edges but testosterone is leaving its indelible print—since the first day of training, his jaw has gotten squarer, his forearms have gotten firmer, his throat has gotten a little thicker, diving down into marble shoulders and tight delts. His musculature is still unsculpted here and there but it is far more developed than the scrawny brunet who’d scowled his way through Shadis’s first roll call.

Ah yeah, hard and soft in all the right places like his pouty lower lip, the apples of his cheeks, his narrow hips, his slender powerful thighs, perfect sun-kissed iron under that white denim. Heat, heat, and more heat. The heat of strength, the heat of vigor, the heat of passion. He still has tan lines from the summer. And not to mention his hands, God damn his hands, boyish but bony, and a little beat-up, and a little bitten at the nails, and a little graceless but still somehow soft and warm like when he pokes Jean under the slanted desk in the lecture hall, like when he runs a thumb over Jean’s lower lip or his lashes or the shell of his ear, and the birdlike bones and veins shift under his skin, under his knuckles, and the heart line in his palm is one of Jean’s favorite places to kiss—

They are playing with fire, Jean knows.

Sooner than later someone will know—someone other than Marco—someone, because they are so painfully obvious, aren’t they?

He is stuck on this one seemingly pointless idea:

How do you _date_ in a military boot camp?

The accident in the alley during Jour des Morts has unlocked something in him—and in Eren, too, apparently. They’re sixteen. It’s not unexpected. The childish fluffy naiveté is sharpening, crystallizing, transmuting into something wholly more uncharted and unpredictable. Something hungry, something indiscriminate, something horny and powerful and mortally desperate.

Yeah, there’s _sex_ now.

There’s secret sideways glances in the refectory and little hand gestures across the quad during combat, and making out in the equipment loft of Stable Two instead of brushing the leather like they’re supposed to be.

There’s not any less sneaking around but now there’s an end goal to meet—stealing like thieves away from rec hour and into the old Wallist chapel to kiss hard and moan harder under the icons of the goddesses and saints, a little tangle of shivering sin and newfound release, hand pumping on one cock while hips buck and knees shake and the other waits in throbbing bliss.

There’s skipping around back of the chicken coop after the instructors in charge of breakfast have already been around to collect morning eggs, to cleave together in a lazy embrace in the bracing winter air, sharing body heat and soft good-morning kisses, breathing in rhythm with each other and smelling hair, skin, nape of the neck, getting drunk on it right then and there to last through the day.

There’s Eren tiptoeing down to Jean’s bunk and then bugging out before the sun rises and roll call is in full swing. “Armin doesn’t notice,” he promises, whispering it against the corner of Jean’s mouth. But still, at Jean’s begging, Eren is careful about it. It is not an every night thing. They’ve almost been caught once already. Jean is not about to proceed beyond _almost_. There is no sex in his bed. There is only slow quiet kissing and falling asleep together. His inner alarm clock is pretty failsafe. Then again, he wakes up every hour anyway, unlike Eren, who sleeps like the dead. And drools on his shoulder.

Exhausted and sore from training, there is laughing, and flirting, and arguing, though arguing is sort of flirting now, too, except maybe it always has been. There is new competition during logistics training and firearms practice, who can get the other worked up fastest, rearing to go or blushing and stammering like a dunce.

There are pretend-fights and the occasional real fight, like when Jean spends too much time in the infirmary with Marco and his broken ankle, or when Eren accuses Jean of _distracting_ him from _his goal_. Fights like that usually end with tears from the Shiganshina crybaby and apologetic kisses to sticky cheeks, and sometimes even with a quickie in an equipment shed or an empty dormitory room, shuffling footsteps on cold sun-stained floorboards, hands down the front of tight white jeans, knees thudding to the floor and the wet sounds of a blow job drowned out by a soliloquy of rolling gasps and tiny whimpers.

Sometimes Reiner winks and drawls, “Sometimes you just gotta duke it out, right?” and Berthold is stuttering and aghast and Jean and Eren frantically discuss this type of development over peeling potatoes or washing dishes, little hisses of, “Do they know? They can’t know. You think they _know_? I bet they’re fucking doing the same thing…”

Everyone, everyone else, they all seem to have accepted that the Kirschtein-Jäger dynamic is not quite as volatile as it was before. They’re over their differences. They’re more mature now. Or maybe it’s just that no one will say aloud that they suspect, that they _know_.

It’s nothing unexpected. Everyone does it.

They are children no more, they are soldiers, and they do what they need to do to survive with a smile. How many times have they listened to friends and peers and fellow trainees talk about sex, about experimentation, about crushes and secret rendezvous in this mountain place where it becomes a little silver lining in the cloud of coming graduation ceremonies? It’s the harmony of humans and they are only human. They are _human_. Who cares if they grow up too fast? They’re certainly not getting any younger.

There’s also the smell of sex on the fingers—rich, heady, sweet, unique, tantalizing. There’s hiding hickeys in the shared shower barracks, though Nac or Reiner is more inclined to wear them proudly, and they all think Eren is too, but really he just forgets about them until someone points them out and wheedles for a culprit’s name. Nac suggests Mikasa and Jean flinches for him; Eren throws a bar of hard gray military-issue soap and gives Nac the bloody nose of the century. (Eren begs for laundry duty again instead of points docked from his Aptitude Score.)

There’s Eren’s ass in those God damn belts, _hell yes_. There is a God, and God is good, and Jean is much, much, so much better at getting into the belts without help than Eren is, and Eren doesn’t complain except in public when Jean tries to help him adjust the back pieces, the side attachments.

“I wanna see you in them naked,” Jean husks down the back of Eren’s neck and Eren is reduced to a feisty flustered mess of smacking hands and indignant albeit blushing swear words.

“How fast can you take them off?” Jean teases relentlessly. He likes having this little bit of control over the uncontrollable. Yes, the uncontrollable is Eren. He is a force of fucking nature, Eren Jäger. It is the great downfall of man, trying to control the uncontrollable.

“How fast can _you_ take them off?” Eren parries in the equipment loft of Stable Two (it’s their most recent favorite necking spot during horseback maneuvering drills), and he casts such a dark daring seductive look that catches Jean utterly off guard.

Yes, something has broken open in Eren, too, a great needy fissure. He is suddenly completely aware of his own sex appeal, his own sexual power, or maybe just the power of sex—and he is ravenous for it. Like he wants to perfect the art of it. Like he wants to memorize the poetry of it. Like he wants to know how his body works, what his body likes. It kind of frightens Jean. Not because it is impersonal; no, it’s far from that. It alarms him solely because he loves it. Eren’s lust is bottomless and it is unforgiving and it makes Jean feel kind of shy because why can’t _he_ be so shameless, so courageous, why does it make _him_ feel submissive when he is the one dominating the kisses, the touching? Oh, but it is so fucking beautifully _fitting_ of Eren and it’s bewitching. He lets Eren move him, move with him, move through him. He is smitten. He is doomed. He has never felt so alive.

But sometimes it’s torture.

Sometimes Jean just wants to _fucking touch him_ and he can’t help himself, he nudges Eren’s knee with his own under the slanted lecture hall desk, he drums his stub of pencil with one hand and runs his other up Eren’s leg, lets his fingers swirl idle arabesques and curlicues on that tight hot spot just above his knee, lets his thumb dig into the crease between hip and inner thigh.

The most gratifying part about it is—well, touching him. It’s not even sexual at the core. It’s just the sensory satisfaction; he is absolutely blissfully addicted. Every touch is a fresh wave of the warm fuzzy obsession. Eren is alive. Eren is hot. Eren is supple. Eren is firm. Eren is overload on all Jean’s senses but he just can’t stay away. The touch buzzes under his skin.

But the other great part about it is that Eren is fucking clueless as to how to react to such a deliciously violating touch, because they are in the lecture hall, they are listening to individual presentations on military stratagem, it is so quiet except for the occasional rustle, the infrequent throat clearing, a whisper here and there, shuffle of paper, scratch of Instructor Pelee’s chalk on the board marking the grade of each presentation right then and there as Jean’s fingers dive lower and he runs a hard index knuckle up the heat of Eren’s dick behind his fly—

And Eren squeaks. He fucking _squeaks_ , and it is glorious, and Jean yanks his hand away biting back the loud triumphant laugh because he really does not mean anything by it, he just wants to touch, but now everyone is looking their way—not altogether, a couple at a time, and most pointedly the instructor—and Eren is such a bright stuttering wide-eyed red that it is totally worth it. Jean has not seen Eren looking this tormented and confounded since his first concussion, back when they were conditioning for maneuver gear.

But Eren does not quite understand how this sneaky touching stuff works. He spins and he lands a hard punch on Jean’s shoulder, choking on words that are not really words but flustered indignant oaths. This might actually be for the better, Eren’s tactless temper and sometimes lack of common sense, because at least now everyone thinks they’re just picking on each other again and not copping a few feels under the lecture table.

“ _Trainees!_ ” Pelee snaps. “Outside, ten laps each, _now!_ And when you’re back, I expect your presentations!”

Jean is so fucking in love.

* * *

“Trouble in paradise?” someone heckles from the veranda of the refectory, and Eren flashes an obscene gesture or two their way, voice fraying as in a conscious outrage he retorts:

“Fuck you, we’re not fucking, do you really have nothing better to do than imagine me and Jean in bed together, pus-bucket?”

Ah, and they’re not fucking. Not technically. They’re _fooling around_.

And they’re both presently fuming after a heated argument in the mess hall became another public display of aggression, Mikasa snapping, “Eren, don’t shout,” and Armin looking worriedly between his two friends and Conny backing away with Sasha, brows raised, eyes wide. Tables across the entire refectory turned to look their way. And now after Mikasa’s half-lecture and Armin’s sympathetic frown, Eren is storming off to his laundry duty as the rest of the 104th eases into a Saturday evening of cards and rationed coffee and probably laughter and music in a dormitory lounge.

Eren has music in the short narrow washroom building, with its tight laundry line, washboards, crates full of dirty linen—there’s a radio on the table against the wall, under the high crescent window. A lone naked bulb washes the too-quiet building in pale, sullen light. It smells of soap and wet sheets. A mouse scurries off into a crack in the plaster of the wall.

Eren throws his jacket down on the table. The wood stove in the corner is empty of kindling. The chore will keep him warm; it’s already got him sweating lugging the basin of hot water from the kitchen over to this building.

He leans before the dusty little radio, playing with the faded knobs. Finally he finds a nearby broadcast that cuts through the static well enough. Hermina District. Some fuzzy good old-fashioned pianoforte. It’s a little depressing. He doesn’t mind, so long as no broadcast jockeys try to speak over it.

Sometimes he likes being alone.

Eventually he calms down enough to untwist his face from the lingering scowl. He’s not really shaking anymore. He doesn’t feel sick to his stomach, either. The fury has faded. It just feels like a bruise in his heart now.

“ _We interrupt this program to announce that voting booths have officially closed and the First Estate election results will be announced as the counting commences._ ”

The pianoforte goes from somber and soothing to galloping, jiving, insert a few horns and woodwinds. Gradually it becomes a solo fiddle. It becomes a raucous swing tune that, alone here, in the silence, with nothing but the slap of water and rattle of washboard and snapping of wet sheets over the clothes line, is somewhat eerie. The lyrics peek out of memory.

_There’ll be oats in the water, there’ll be birds on the ground. There’ll be things you never asked her. Oh, how they tear at you now…_

Eren stoops to retrieve some clothespins from the basket and when he rises again, there is Jean.

Eren snorts, drops the clothespin, almost rears back out of surprise but remembers all of a sudden why he is angry at him. “Hi,” he snaps. “What do you want?”

Jean follows him down the laundry line, weaving in and out of wide white sheets trying to catch Eren’s eye. Finally Eren can avoid him no longer; he’s run out of clothespins again. He turns sharply. Jean almost runs right into him.

“I’m sorry—” Jean spits out. “I didn’t mean it—”

“Okay,” Eren parries, unsympathetically. He brushes past Jean and off towards the rest of his chore.

Jean closes his hand on Eren’s elbow, halting him roughly. Eren jerks away but does not keep going. He turns again, feeling the burn anew. “Don’t be sorry,” he hisses up at Jean, and while Jean’s eyes have that sad little rue in them, he’s definitely returning Eren’s scowl.

“Why _not_?” he demands.

“You should never apologize for anything.”

“What? Okay, you’re crazy—”

“No, I’m not. If you always say what you mean and mean what you say, you’ll never have to apologize for something you ‘didn’t mean.’”

Jean accepts defeat on this one; rather, he respectfully resigns with the blame. He stands there, so fucking handsome, with his hands in his pockets and one leg locked, head ducked slightly, watching Eren with those piercing almond-shaped eyes. No kicked puppy Jean here; he is all suave and cool confidence and responsibility.

Eren kicks the basket of clothespins over just so he can stoop to his haunches and pick them up again. That way he doesn’t have to meet Jean’s disarming frown. God, Jean’s eyes burn into him. That eerie song jumps and shimmies from the radio.

“What did I say?” Jean husks, voice raw and ragged. “What did I say that upset you so much?”

Eren bounces up swiftly, more than ready to answer this one. Tears are stinging the backs of his eyes again. God, he hates how easily he can cry when he gets worked up. He’s rolling clothespins over and over in his shaking fists.

“That I can’t do it!” he spouts, and for good measure chucks a clothespin Jean’s way. It’s too forceful to make it all the way. It hits the ground right at Jean’s booted toe, and skitters off aimlessly to the side.

“That I can’t do it,” Eren says again, shoulders heaving, breathing hard. “You said I won’t kill them all. But I _will_ , Jean. _Or I’ll die trying_ —”

Jean has him in his arms in four swift powerful strides and Eren fights it at first, hissing, grunting, crying, “No, this doesn’t work like that, you can’t just kiss me and make it all better!” But much as Eren resists, tripping over clothespins, groping for purchase, only yanking a sheet off the laundry line—much as he insists otherwise, it _can_ work that way. And this time, of all times, it does.

Jean backs him up hard against the flimsy table with the radio. The swing-swing is far too chipper for this moment of defeat. Eren wilts in his hands, surrenders to the kiss. There is nothing rough or selfish about it. It is not a distraction on Jean’s part from his transgressions; it is not deflection or manipulation. He tastes like a tear, like apology, and Eren concedes.

They kiss—slow, deep, bodies rolling with it, fingers clutching, brows knotting, strings of spit snapping between dodging tongues. And they haven’t done it in almost a week because it’s been very hard lately to get a long enough moment alone, and God forbid either of their scores suffer for it. Jean’s touch sparks jolts under Eren’s skin, draws sounds of capitulation out from the back of his throat he didn’t know were hiding there. Jean’s teeth graze his lower lip and he tastes like metal and spit and coffee from after dinner, probably; his body radiates a heat that Eren wants to climb into and close his eyes. The kisses capsize. They grow amorous, indulgent, evocative.

Eren’s stomach is in tangles. His heart jumps and then jumps again. He eases back, leans back, runs his hands eagerly up Jean’s sides and then down towards his belt buckle—

“ _Here_?” Jean whisper-gasps from the kisses he’s dropping down Eren’s throat, and Eren nods mutely, the fine little hairs standing up on the back of his neck. “Someone could come in at any moment—”

“I have the key to lock up after I’m done…”

Eren fairly sprints to lock the washroom door from the inside, dropping the key to the table. Jean smacks his ass lovingly upon his return and Eren throws his arms around his neck, diving right back into the kisses. Noses nudging, chins bumping, _pop_ and _smack_ in the music-driven hush.

“I want you so much,” Eren confesses miserably. “I still hate your guts, though—”

“Good,” Jean grunts, husky, throaty, and with Eren’s belt undone in turn, he shoves his hand up under his shirt to toy with his nipples. Eren’s hips buck; he bites his lower lip against a mewling moan. He is getting so hard, so fast. He hates Jean for this. Jean breaks him down so badly in the worst way. The blood is stirring between his hips. He’d be embarrassed of the obvious bulge at the front of his pants if not for being shameless.

A sexual awakening is quite the terrifying and liberating metamorphosis, after all.

“Let’s do it,” Eren chokes.

“We _are_ ,” Jean reminds.

“No, let’s—all the way.”

“What’s the difference?”

“ _Fuck me_ ,” Eren snarls, eyes flashing, and the look of utter shock on Jean’s face is priceless and dear. But then his face darkens. He knows. He is serious again. He is ready. He has obviously been waiting for this request.

“It’ll hurt—” he still argues, a Trostian gentleman.

“No, it won’t. Get out of your pants—start jacking off—”

“What—?”

“Just listen to me. Come on, I want you—so bad—”

Eren knows what to do.

He’s never had a boyfriend, no; he’s never dated anyone, either. But life as a young refugee after Armin’s grandfather left nothing but his straw hat was hard and when rations ran out by the time hungry cold child laborers made it to the end of the bread lines, well, once or twice refugeedom demanded some things Eren is not proud of. Maybe one day he can tell Jean about it. Maybe one day they’ll talk about it, like he can’t ever talk to Mikasa about it because she doesn’t know and he never gets far enough without crying and shutting up, like he talks to Armin about it sometimes, and Armin still gets that glassy-eyed distant look like he feels like it’s his fault somehow—

But that is in the past and Eren has moved on and this is different. This is _not the same_.

He yanks away from Jean only to stagger out of his boots, to get his pants all the way undone— Jean winds him back in like this is some animalistic mating dance and takes initiative, whips himself out, hand flying. The sight of Jean’s dick in his fast fingers, swollen with lust and flushed a precious pink, ah, Eren wants to see, he wants to know the mechanics of it, he is obsessed with the mechanics of all this, in an inexorable fusion instead of detachment of private pleasure and heedless curiosity.

He shoves Jean’s hand out of the way to use his mouth instead, tongue and spit.

Jean groans long and almost breathless, grabbing the edge of the table for stability as his knees buckle. He is loving this. Thank God.

They have attempted this twice before, two or three swirling fingers wrapped in linens in the absence of silk ribbon sex sheaths like sold in specialty shops in cities. This— _real sex_. They’ve tried twice and chickened out twice but this is a tipping point.

They sink to the floor and Eren mounts Jean, straddles him, pants kicked off around one woolen-socked ankle. Before the blow job is for nothing, he helps Jean ease in—awkward, uncomfortable, Eren fidgets, shifts his hips, tries to accommodate the penetration, which burns at first, burns, but the deeper Jean goes the number it gets and he’s tingling head to toe, he’s sweating already, he’s forgetting to swallow his own spit, _Jean is inside him_.

The election results are not in yet; it’s back to the soft pianoforte on the radio.

Eren knows Jean’s cock intimately by now. He’s stroked it enough times, fondled it enough times. He knows the hot length of it, the silky head, the way it almost pulses in his fingers when he comes. Jean is thick, and Jean is inside him, and Jean’s kisses are hot and soft, searing their worried ghosts onto Eren’s open mouth because Eren can’t kiss back, he is too busy moaning and gasping and hunching forward, fingernails scraping Jean’s chest, tickle of Jean’s treasure trail, his head is thrown back again and _right there_ , something inside _right there_ is delightfully sensitive and throbbing at every nudge of Jean’s dick and Eren can’t figure out what to focus on, the rock of Jean’s hips as he fucks him on the floor or how fucking hard he is, practically pre-coming on his own belly—

“ _Hahh_ … _Ah_ …”

“Shh—shh, please—”

“ _Fffffuck_ … _yes_ …”

“Oh God—hey—”

Jean is worried Eren is in pain. Eren is not. He is dizzy and breathless and feels like he’s going to come just from the strange swollen foreign heat of penetration and he can hardly lift his hand to press a finger to Jean’s lower lip, gasping, “It’s okay, it’s okay, oh my God, it feels good—”

It didn’t, at first, admittedly. But now it does. And it is so much better than Jean’s wiggling fingers.

“I didn’t mean it—” Jean’s back is arching; he’s got his feet firmly planted and he’s driving up deeper, faster. One of his hands finds Eren’s sex and his thumb starts swirling on hypersensitive places, tight skin, pre-ejaculate. “I didn’t mean it,” he groans again. “What I said—I know you’ll kill them all—you can and you will—”

He tightens his fingers and maybe he doesn’t mean to, but it sends Eren over the edge and he’s coming. Muscles are tensing, tightening, shivering, releasing. Jean utters a clipped, startled sound, crunching up and moving his hand fast and his hips faster. The spasms rattle through. Eren crumples down against Jean’s chest and it jostles him as Jean finishes, too, heat exploding somewhere under Eren’s tailbone. Another wave of orgasmic shudders rushes down his spine and when Eren bursts into fresh tears, Jean pulls out, panting over his shoulder, looming, blocking out the light.

“Eren—what the fuck—you fucking lied to me, didn’t you? It fucking hurt, didn’t it?”

“It _did_ —but not the whole time—no, no, stop, Jean, I liked it even if it hurt a little—”

“Why the fuck are you crying—”

“I’m not crying!”

“You’re crying, Eren! I’m looking right at you!”

“I think I came twice!”

Jean’s face pinches and he looks alarmed, confused, but also pleased. He tries to swipe away Eren’s tears but Eren folds his arms across his face, shivering still, hiccupping some. They’ve switched positions, somehow. Jean is hovering over him and he’s finally on his back on the floor. The world is spinning. He feels sore and empty without Jean inside him. He is mildly disgusted by Jean’s come, slimy on his skin, but he is far more curious about it.

Jean’s kisses tickle his ear and cheek. “Why are you crying?” he whispers, practically pleading. “Eren, why are you crying?”

“Because I feel really happy…” Eren moans between his teeth, arms crossed over his eyes, and then he can’t fight it anymore. He just sobs, like a baby. It feels just as good as coming right now. It cleanses him, somehow.

They lay together on the hard floor, Eren in Jean’s arm and Jean running his fingers through his dark hair like his mom used to, like Mikasa still does.

It is quiet, finally.

Eren uses his sleeve to wipe the last of the snot from his nose, sniffles the rest up, rubs at his itchy eyes with the balls of his palms.

Jean clears his throat. Maybe he’d gotten teary, too. What fucking men they are. He doesn’t want to let go of Jean. But the floor is uncomfortable. He sits up and tries to get back into his pants. Jean runs his fingers along his back, up under his shirt.

“You leave first,” Eren croaks, returning the loving touch with a gentle squeeze to Jean’s knee. “I’ll see you back in the dorms.”

“Okay,” Jean husks. “Sounds good.”

He sits up, too. He kisses the back of Eren’s neck, holding them. He breathes in Eren’s scent and Eren likes it. They sit together in the quiet a moment longer. Jean cleans up, re-fastens his jeans. He casts Eren a glance over his shoulder as he leaves, tossing the washroom key back to Eren’s cupped palms.

“You really liked it?” he asks, in a tiny little voice, brow knotted above his sad, sad eyes.

Eren nods—maybe a little too vigorously, stretching his lower back, leaning forward to touch his socked toes. He’s going to be fucking sore tomorrow. He offers a tiny smile. “Yeah.”

“Me, too,” Jean whispers, half a shadow in the open doorway. He’s gone.

And Eren knows that he means it.

* * *

“How’s it feeling?”

Marco looks up, hobbling to a stop on the veranda outside the Block A dormitory building with his secondhand crutch. He is out of the brace but he is to stay off his ankle for a fortnight more. He breaks into a smile like the sun shaking free of the clouds. He nods, shrugs. His face is flushed from the brisk winter evening. He hops to the side and leans back against the porch railing, waving his crutch at Jean.

“Better,” he says. “Much better. I start physical therapy next week.”

“Good!” Jean nods. “So they’ll let you do the spring final trials?”

“Shadis gave me the go-ahead, but I guess it’s up to the medic…”

Energetic conversation echoes out of the dormitory lounge, laughter, shouts, voices. Marco puts all his weight on his good leg and turns to face the yard from the veranda, huddling deeper into his coat and lacing his fingers on the railing.

“What made you fall for him?” Marco asks—so plainly, so harmlessly, so sensitively. But Jean still recoils, the ice of nervous adrenaline shooting out into his veins. It’s not like Marco doesn’t know; Marco has _known_ , after all. Marco—

“Don’t worry,” Marco adds quickly. “I’m not jealous. I’m asking because you’re my friend.”

 _You’re my friend_.

Jean heaves a sigh of defeat and helps Marco over to the steps. They sit here instead, away from the spill of light, shoulder to shoulder and sharing a little bit of body heat as their breaths fall in little clouds from their whispers and they rub their gloved hands together between their knees to keep them from tingling.

“I don’t know,” Jean mumbles.

“He’s just sort of…” Jean trails off.

“I can’t explain it,” Jean whispers dismally.

“He drives me crazy but it just happened and it keeps happening and I don’t want it to stop,” he finally says, resolutely, in a low and apologetic tone.

Marco nods a little. “Sounds about right.”

“What? What sounds right?”

“Well, you didn’t just say one thing like ‘he’s hot’ or ‘he’s good’ or anything, so I know you’re actually serious about him.”

“No, I just—”

He knows Marco is right. He feels both ashamed and kind of gushy, and he hates it. This is something private. He doesn’t want to talk about it. More, he doesn’t want to admit how much it actually means to him.

But Marco is like a brother to him. Marco is his confidante. Marco is his friend. Marco is rational and reasonable and very positive and Marco is the type of man everyone should know, and Jean just doesn’t really have anyone else he can talk to about personal things without getting all sorts of worked up in one way or another. There are lovers, sure, and lovers who are friends and friends who are lovers and girls that dump him for bankers’ sons and then there are _friends_.

He doesn’t ever want this friendship to go away. And that is bad. He is collecting too many people near and dear to himself—Marco, Eren, Armin, Mikasa… That is reckless. He’s going to pay for it.

“You’re brave, Jean,” Marco murmurs, hunching closer to keep the conversation a low secretive hum between them. Jean cuts him a glance, face puckering in almost comical disagreement.

“What? No.” Jean shakes his head. “No, I’m a fucking coward.”

“Oh my God, Jean. No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am—”

Marco becomes impatient, suddenly. He turns, hard enough that he hits his ankle and winces, a tiny bit. He frowns darkly at Jean, unyieldingly, and disapprovingly. He crosses his arms and shakes his head, raising his brows in a slow gentle arc to his very soft widow’s peak. “You’re not,” he insists again. “And you’ve got to stop second-guessing and denying yourself that. You’ll never get anywhere that way, you know. You won’t get to the MP, you won’t get to the Horse Guards at the capital. You’re not a coward, Jean. You’re a leader waiting to happen.”

“Oh yeah?” Jean snorts kindly. “How do you figure, huh?”

“Leaders aren’t leaders right out of the gate.”

“You’re more a leader than me. You’re smart and skilled and decisive—”

“I’m second-in-command, at best.”

Jean scrutinizes Marco, half-smiling like this is a joke. It’s not, apparently. He runs his tongue along his teeth in something of a defiant gesture, glancing away so Marco can’t see the snark fall from his face in defeat. “You’ve given this thought, haven’t you?”

Marco nods sheepishly.

“So you’re second-in-command and I’m leader quality,” Jean echoes skeptically.

“If you let yourself be,” Marco corrects, and he meets Jean’s eyes very gravely, almost daringly, a quiet soft-spoken sort of challenge to prove him wrong.

Jean sighs, hanging his head into his palms and then scrubbing his hands roughly through his hair, looking up at the winter stars as if beseeching some higher power on this. But there is no higher power listening—if there’s a higher power at all—and the stars and vast firmament are just making him feel very small and insignificant again, and that isn’t really helping with the whole self-worth reassessment.

“All right, you win,” Jean husks. “I hear you, okay?”

* * *

**end ch. iv**


	5. the sound of iron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They wake up to muskets in their faces. Their horses are scared away, their gear is stolen for the black market. If they can't even save Christa, how the fuck can they save the world? “Hero looks good on you,” Eren says. “Now!” Jean shouts, and slightly staggered they swing down to a lower branch and drop to the middle wagon of the caravan of thieves. (And Mikasa saves the day again.) // includes a retelling/revisit of sorts of the SNK OVA 3 // "iron" - woodkid

v. THE SOUND OF IRON

* * *

 

“You missed a spot,” Eren says with a kiss to Jean’s jawline—right there where he missed a little scratchy bit of peach fuzz—and it’s not entirely teasing, it’s kind of like an intentional show of insolence, a cheeky little pluck at Jean’s most frayed nerves with just the two of them left in the shower barracks as everyone moves out to roll call for the Day Mission.

Jean scowls, rolls his eyes, utters an impatient little, “Tch!” as he volleys a glance around the shower rooms to make sure they’re alone. From under a towel, drying his hair and face quickly, he snaps, “Thanks, we’re gonna be late if you don’t leave me alone…”

Sometimes Jean looks utterly tragically doomed in love, fire in his eyes. Sometimes he looks like he needs to scratch Eren out from under his skin. He gets cranky, cold and short-tempered. Most of the time a cranky Jean means nothing but the weight of personal thoughts; every now and again it truly means Jean is annoyed. Eren is trying to learn the difference (not that it really ever deters him one way or the other, until the occasional Kirschtein outburst that means it’s time for Eren to leave him alone for a while).

It’s getting harder and harder to work together with someone you’re having sex with.

Most of the time Eren is more than serious about their Wasteland Marches and their arms practice and their increasingly frequent Day Missions. Sometimes he gets a little distracted by how hot Jean is with a flintlock rifle perched on his shoulder, his cut shoulders and the smooth lines of his body curving into a perfect crouch on the camp shooting range. Other times, like during a Day Mission split into small groups of four and five, winter coats and wool socks and fleece-lined boots sent out into a white mountain world with snow to the knees in some places, horizon blurring into the sky in shades of brittle bone gray as deep green fir trees rain icicles and shake off layers of heavy snow in mini-avalanches and Thomas Wagner complains they should be allowed to use their maneuver gear or horses or something instead of the bare necessities on their mock “supply run” to a military post on the outskirts of the _outskirts_ of the training grounds, even though supply runs like this are typical missions for fresh training squad graduates and they need to be ready, as soldiers they need to be able to rely on themselves just as much as accessories—other times, Eren is distracted arguing with Jean about competing visions and principles and how Jean’s mindset about things is fundamentally _wrong_ and Jean just needs to admit it—

“You don’t try!”

“Fuck you, Eren.”

“You’ve gotta admit that joining the MP just to be ‘safe’ is fucking ridiculous—”

“That’s not fucking fair. Maybe I want to join the MP because I like it better than guarding the wall or Corps expeditions—”

“No, you’re just a lazy Trost bastard!”

“Ha! Okay! Tell that to my Aptitude Scores, you suicidal maniac!”

“Show-off—”

“Psychopath—”

Who said it once, what ancient thinker, from what anonymous source came the sharp little truth—that the worst of words are used amongst the closest of hearts, that man “hurts the ones he loves the most?”

“Is this for real?”

“Is _what_ for real, Eren?”

“Are you serious? About me.”

“I’m serious, Eren, I can’t keep my fucking mind off you and it’s driving me up a wall! It’s terrifying—”

“Why? Why, huh?”

“ _Because_ —”

“If you two don’t fucking shut up,” Ymir hisses, falling behind a few steps with two pairs of snowshoes strapped to her mock supply pack, barging in on the argument Eren had hoped the winter wind would swallow like it was swallowing all his breaths and body heat, “I swear to God, I will personally knock all your teeth out and won’t you give each good head _then_ , huh?”

She jogs back ahead and joins Christa again, shaking her head and waving her hands in exasperation.

Eren gives Jean a tiny shove, scowling. But he is dispirited and defused.

Jean says, “Leave me alone now, for fuck’s sake.” He cranes upwards like it might make his voice carry farther. He calls after Ymir and Christa, “We don’t give each other head!”

In the stables of the outpost, Eren corners Jean amidst the hay and sweet scent of horses and he mumbles reluctantly, “I’m sorry.”

And Jean pulls him close to him, thick coat and hands momentarily free of thick gloves, and his hands feel so good on Eren’s back, on his sides, on his shoulders as they duck together into the shadows for a few kisses that taste like a truce. Like forgiveness. There is a felled tree outside the stables and they linger together, brushing snow away to trace the lines in the trunk that tell of its age, so much older than the history books say, as their fingers tangle and the air stings their faces and Eren tucks both their hands into his pocket to keep warm, stroking his thumb over Jean’s smooth knuckles.

“Remember what you told me? Don’t be sorry. Just mean what you say and say what you mean.”

Eren laughs. “I _do_ mean what I say and say what I mean. I’m apologizing because it hurt you.”

There is a physical self and an emotional self to every man—orgasm versus fatal flaws. His desires, his weaknesses, the sensual parts of himself that are personal in a way that thoughts and memories and feelings are not. There is a divide between these things that does not necessarily mean irrelevance.

But it means knowing an orgasm before a fatal flaw or vice versa is sometimes dangerous. Confounding at the very least.

And it means that whereas, in the past, having a quarrel before a Day Mission is nothing—but now, it is somewhat derailing.

Winter releases the world from its claws later than usual in the mountains. It is still cold, deeply cold at night, but the snow is for the most part gone—lingers in a few muddy slush piles but has melted into streams and rivers and the birds are already back from their vacation in warmer places. Bears are coming out of hibernation.

Eren is frustrated Mikasa is not in his group. He is frustrated Jean is trying to usurp Marco’s assigned role as team leader. He is beyond fed up with Jean showing off, trying to catch that God damn lizard. He is even more frustrated that Jean drags his sleeping bag over close to Eren’s in the night with a little smirk because this is one of those times where Jean _knows_ Eren is upset but Jean isn’t upset and so Jean is breaking him down bit by bit like he always does.

They wake up to muskets in their faces.

Actually, Eren wakes up to the sound of Christa screaming somewhere in the chilly dark, and the thunder of loosed horses in flight from some unknown scare—but he can’t speak for what roused the others—and then he’s rolling over with the taste of metal rising on his teeth and adrenaline raising the hair on him head to toe, and his mouth is open but nothing’s coming out but a few groggy foleys as his body stirs slower than his mind and he’s staring down—up?—staring up the barrel of a musket aimed at him from above.

Moonlight glints off the gun. A man wearing a potato sack stares through cut-out eyes. He reeks of dirt and sweat. He growls, “Don’t move.”

Eren doesn’t move. He hardly breathes.

Jean is awake beside him. There is another man with Armin at gunpoint, a second and a third near Sasha and Conny.

This is an obvious ambush on useless green cadets.

“Gather all their gear, hurry—”

Everyone is frozen. Eren’s eyes widen. Not out of fear. No, he feels _angry_. He feels cold and angry and he shifts a little; the stranger aiming at him follows his movements. The terror bright and cold in his friends’ eyes is unacceptable, and it sparks a blaze of merciless rage in Eren.

“What the hell are you going to do with it?” he demands, so livid he is not even shouting.

All the others bristle in their sleeping bags. Eren can feel their pointed glances, crawling on his skin.

“People buy it,” the same man snarls. His voice is muffled through his teeth and stained canvas. “People pay more than they make for it. We sell it.”

Eren can smell the gun powder.

In a cabin, in the woods, alone, brutally stabbed some arrogant thugs, over, and over, and over, and over, the blood on the floor and the blood on his hands, and they were animals in the skin of humans— _He’s killed three men_ people love to say about him.

They’re wrong, though. He killed two. Mikasa killed the third.

Eren is not afraid—for himself, at least. Maybe there is something wrong with him. Maybe his inner compass for danger is broken or at least severely jammed. But he has stared titans in the face; he has stabbed two grown men. A few thieves in eerie, traumatizing masks are laughable. He can feel the feral fury pulsing under his flesh, with every throb of his furious heart. He will take a gunshot wound if it means he can sweep this asshole off his feet and break his nose with his elbow, snatch the gun from him and get the other two on their knees begging for mercy, and he’ll take down the other and then springboard off him onto the third and bash his face into the ground while the fourth one watches, teeth and pebbles jumping in the dirt—

The thief pointing the gun at him goes on: “We don’t stand a fucking chance against the titans, anyway. The shit’s worthless. Might as well make a profit off of it—”

 _Don’t stand a chance_ …

That’s it.

Eren snaps.

There is no more blood in his veins; there is only molten rage. He is filled with hate and contempt for these strangers. The gun metal is cold and smooth under his clammy palms as he lurches to his feet and throws the barrel out of his face, screeching: “Now, everyone!”

Chaos. Perfect chaos. The main thief is trying to wrestle his gun out of Eren’s grip. Someone shouts Eren’s name; a gun goes off. In the foray, the bullet grazes Jean’s cheek.  

And Eren really fucking loses it.

That is, he loses his focus. His heart stops. He opens his mouth to shout Jean’s name; the butt of the largest thief’s musket slams into his face instead.

He hits the ground in a burst of lights and sounds, spitting blood and guttural shock.

Jean’s motionless. No one else is moving, either. No one else moved to begin with. And now Eren has two guns pointed his way.

“I said _don’t move_ ,” the largest thief repeats himself. “Shut the fuck up and stay put.”

They take the ultrahard steel, the gas cans, the gear, and they take Christa as collateral.

What happened?

_What the fuck happened?_

Furious tears are stinging the backs of Eren’s eyes raw. He is trembling. Everyone is trembling. He is trembling because he wants to hit someone, something, anything. He spins on his so-called comrades, his friends, his fellow soldiers—

“If all of you had attacked when I said so, we would have had them!” he screams, and his voice is ragged and fraying. The rage is alive inside him; it is part of the sea and it is a typhoon.

“You don’t know that,” Jean spits, of course the first to speak. Eren is seeing red. He is seeing too much red to discern whether it’s a defense mechanism or Jean’s honest opinion. As if he has any right. As if any of them have any right—

“We all could have died thanks to you!” Jean is still berating. “You’re a fucking madman, you know that? They could have killed you—they could have killed all of us—”

“We should retreat—” Marco is frantically trying to fill the shoes of team leader. The panic is electric between them all.

“So we’re just going to abandon Christa?” Eren sputters.

“No,” Marco interjects, “but we can’t do anything ourselves, can we? We should go back and notify Instructor Shadis right away—”

“And what if it’s too late then?” Eren cries. His hands are balled in tight, aching fists. He tries to keep his voice steady and contained but it becomes a roar: “I won’t let that happen, no fucking way. I’m getting Christa back! _And I’ll do it myself if I have to!_ ”

He is blowing through the dark thickets of trees and underbrush before he can even think twice about it. His breath is ripping hot and urgent from his chest. The tears are clotting at his eyelashes; they scald him. How can they all really be so helpless? He won’t be helpless. He wasn’t helpless before, when he saved Mikasa. He was helpless when the titans took Shiganshina but he won’t be helpless again, God damn it— _he won’t be helpless again_ —

“Eren!” Armin calls after him.

“Eren!” Mina shouts, and Marco too: “Eren!”

He will not let them take Christa without a fight. He is not helpless. They don’t get it. This isn’t for them. This isn’t for that fucking sadist Shadis. This isn’t for him, either. This is not a show of courage or valor or virtue or even tenacity. It’s just in his Icarian nature and he is powerless to it.

“ _Wait!_ ”

Jean crashes through the foliage after him.

He catches up faster than Eren anticipates. He snatches him by the shoulder and Eren endeavors to shake him off, but Jean knows him better. He is still talking. Jean is so good at talking.

“Our horses are gone—they scared them away—how are we gonna find her if we don’t even have our horses—”

Everything is absurd to Eren except for his raw throbbing protective rage. He wants to find those men and make them pay for what they’ve done. He can still taste blood in his mouth and his skin isn’t split from the musket blow but he’s sure he’ll have a gnarly bruise by morning. He finally throws Jean off him in a tiny private scuffle as cold moonlight fills the forest, and he almost trips on a few loose rocks buried in pine needles but he rights himself as he retorts, “Who fucking cares?”

“I do, because I’m going with you!” Jean seethes, and it’s like a slap in the face.

“I don’t need your help,” Eren growls between his teeth.

“Oh, you need a lot of fucking help,” Jean parries easily, “and some of it you can’t get from me but _this_ I am helping you with.”

“Marco probably needs your help more.”

“Don’t _fucking_ make this into some jealousy bullshit when someone’s life is on the line—”

“ _I’m going after Christa!_ ” Eren roars—rather, he starts to, but Jean clamps a hand so hard and fast on his mouth that it dissolves into a string of disgruntled sounds and hissing breath.

“We were _pathetic_ back there,” Jean rages. “I can’t… I can’t believe we were so pathetic and I don’t want to leave it that way. You’re right, Eren. We let you down. But I won’t let you down again!”

His voice is jagged. His hazel eyes flash, unforgivingly—and oh, this is a flare-up of some deeper design, something more noxious than Jean’s usual anger, something unknown and roiling like the depths of the sea. It is not panic. It is his own drive. Jean has his back. Jean understands him and his legacy of suicidal bastardry, even if he doesn’t share it. And Eren is not so worked up that he isn’t proud of his man for this rusty pluck.

He’s also startled to uncomfortable silence, but there’s no time to analyze how Jean lets his reason get in the way of his resolve like Eren lets his resolve get in the way of his reason because the others emerge from the shadows of the trees, ruined campsite left behind—Armin, Mina, Marco, Sasha, Conny.

And they are all looking at Eren like he is their hope.

Jean’s eyes blaze into Eren’s. Eren is galvanized, inflamed, emboldened, staring back. Jean trusts him. They all trust him. He needs to trust them, too.

“Okay,” Eren husks, the hotheaded rage cooling and refining and sharpening into a blade of purer instinct, less violent and irrational. “What should we do?”

At Sasha’s huntress masterminding, they scramble for a high place. It is rockier here than at actual camp, whole groves opening up onto miniature cliff faces or tall sloping heaps of stone like chicken bones left after a feast. There are still some patches of ice on the rocks, lacing moss and lichen. But the moonlight swathing the green and the gray makes the whole thing breathtaking, and they billy goat their way to a gravelly ridge once they realize a silky ribbon of campfire smoke and the mountain road are both visible below them.

On their bellies they watch through a field glass as the muggers load up their wagons.

“I have an idea,” Armin says. He’s got his game face on.

Sliding back into the shadows of the rocks lest their foes also have long-distance sight, Armin takes Marco’s map and lays his plan out.

“If they’re trying to sell our stuff,” he murmurs, voice cold, eyes sharp but skittish like he is talking to himself more than the rest of them, “they’ll need buyers. The nearest town is Oodell. We should get ahead of them and ambush them where the road forks.”

It is an elaborate scheme—Sasha and Conny blocking the road, Mina playing lookout, Marco and Armin rigging an alarm out of two empty dented tin cups from camp for communication, and Eren with Jean in the trees ready to attack.

All things considered, they are stationed as appropriately as possible.

Moonlight filters through branches and leaves, casting dappled patterns across Jean’s face where he and Eren are crouched like animals high up off the ground. Pine trees are a breeze; if they are not good at acrobatics by now, then what are they doing here?

Jean tenses; he cuts Eren a look, like he could feel him watching him.

“What?” he hisses between his teeth, high alert from his head to his toe. And oh God, he is a soldier. When he stopped being a moody Trost kid and became this creature carved of instinct and integrity, Eren isn’t sure, but there’s no denying it now, and like looking at the sun too long, this image of Jean is burned into his mind’s eye, he will see it for hours after, bright, blinding, stunning—

They are all soldiers.  

“Hero looks good on you,” Eren husks. He isn’t being sappy. He is as honest as he ever is.

“Now? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re nuts, you’re absolutely fucking _crazy_ —”

But much as Jean tries to snub, he does not deny Eren a quick, hard kiss. A kiss of good luck. A kiss of faith. A kiss in preparation of failure. A kiss of, “Looks good on you, too…”

The sound of the wagons on the mountain road is thunderous. Mina’s birdlike whistle sounds from one side of the road; the tin cups rattle. Marco is so ruthlessly vigilant. Thank God for Marco—

“Now!” Jean shouts, and slightly staggered they swing down to a lower branch and drop to the middle wagon of the caravan.

It is a wild moment. There is no room for thought, just action. Eren hits the wagon tarp and almost falls; at the last second he grabs hold of the end bow and swings himself inside the wagon after Jean.

There are two thieves in this cart. For a moment they all look around at each other stupidly. The gear is in this wagon, for sure. But Christa’s not. Eren’s ears are ringing. He’s a little dazed by the action, but only for a split second. Now fucking what?

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the startled thieves demands. He grapples for Jean, but in a great feat of muscle memory, or maybe just skill, or maybe both, Jean ducks and sends the thief flailing out the back of the cart with a sound shoulder.

The second thief in the wagon is screaming at Eren; his breath reeks and Eren sweeps him off his feet with little to no restraint. God, it feels good. Jean has the wagon driver in a headlock, the wagon swerves, Eren and the second thief stagger to the side together, but Eren is smaller and nimbler and bounces back off the canvas fast enough to literally kick the stumbling second thief out onto the road. Must hurt, a fall like that at this speed on such uneven ground. _Good_.

“Eren!” Jean’s voice is a relief to hear, even strained and alkaline with adrenaline as it is. “Christa’s in the wagon in front of us—”

A rifle goes off; a new thief in a straw hat is shooting at them from the wagon ahead, with Christa bound as hostage. But the mountain road works in their favor. The asshole misses. The bullet sparks off a metal bow on the wagon. In a frantic dance, Jean and Eren rear back from the gunman. The driver jumps and the horses are guiding the second wagon on their own—no, Jean’s got the reins now—and Christa with her hands tied is wrestling with the gunman, worried he’ll shoot her friends, and that’s not good, that was never part of the plan—

_Bam!_

Another poorly-aimed bullet rips through the second wagon’s front wheel. It explodes in a rain of stakes and splinters; the wagon careens to a hard stop against a tree as the rest of the bandit caravan jostles by.

“Hey!” Jean barks from the front, his voice in tatters already, but still charged with the same determination. “Eren! Are you okay—”

Eren shoves away the heavy crate that almost tumbled down on him during the crash, instead only pinned him between another, elbow stuck in a coil of rope. “Yeah, somehow,” he groans, struggling to his feet. Jean’s silhouette looms; he takes the proffered hand and Jean helps him up, seems to be secretly checking for wounds Eren might lie about. Eren is fine. If he’s injured at all beyond the blooming yellow and purple bruise on his face, he won’t feel it until he’s not angry.

“Jean! Eren!”

It’s Marco, and Armin, and the others. They’ve finally caught up. They look guilty, like this is somehow they’re fault. Nothing is their fault. There’s just been a slight change in plans.

“We’re safe—” Jean reports. “So’s the gear—”

“They still have Christa!” Eren interrupts. He can’t tell if the taste of blood is from, well, blood or fury. “Who knows what they’ll do to her now—”

The decision is unanimous. Look how much they’ve done already. They are not useless, or helpless, or thoughtless. They are fucking _soldiers_. And they gear up and they take off after the thieves and kidnappers.

Having the maneuver gear back is a stunning, glorious relief.

It never fails to please Eren. The raw exhilaration of flying through the air, of arcing, of twisting and soaring. There’s nothing cliché about it, nothing like feeling like a bird or some shit. It’s transcendental. It’s terrifying. It’s liberating. He is human and he is unstoppable. It’s a surge of endorphins, the air buffering him, the kickback of the mechanism, the tightening of his core, and the ground far beneath him. He is free. He is powerful. The melody of the wind and the beat of his heart forge a grand, invincible song—

The mechanism squeals, metal grinding. It is a beautiful sound. And Jean is swinging through the air right next to him, hair dancing in and out of his face, back arching, eyes flashing, God he is so good at this, his momentum is horrifying.

There it is, the caravan. In the first wagon the gunman has his rifle trained on Christa.

With a mechanical piston _pop_ and a steely wire hiss, Eren aims for the wagon. He means to hook onto the tarp, or a bow, but—miraculously—the grapple hook actually collides right with the rifle in a blossom of sparks. The gun flies from the bandit’s hands. He snatches another one. _Pop!_ Another one. _Pop!_ He’s going through all the flintlocks he has on hand but like Jean, Eren is weaving through the air. They have only been studying for heat of the moment tactical precision for how many years now?

_Pop! Pop! Pop!_

The world is upside down for a moment.

It moves in slow motion to right itself, and the nighttime wind tosses Eren’s hair in and out of his eyes, caresses his skin, urges him on—

He grapples to a tree to launch himself towards the front of the wagon as planned. Almost in sync, he and Jean slash at the reins. Jean voiced concerns earlier about hurting the horse. Eren is willing to draw a little blood.

They do not. They slice through the reins, freeing the frightened horse from the cart. It takes off into the forest as a beefy bandit scrambles for the emergency brake. It blows the rickety wheels off and the wagon veers, topples, goes crashing into a side of the mountain. With a resounding rumble, a tree goes down with it.

A wheel is still spinning in the silence and dust clouding the wreckage.

And the beefy bandit with the bulbous earring in one lobe has a rusty sickle poised at Christa’s lily-white throat.

“Don’t come any closer! Drop your fucking weapons, hand over your gear! _Hurry the fuck up!_ ”

The sun is breaking free of the horizon, spilling its rosy greeting over rough terrain and shivering trees. The birds, however, are quiet, as if very aware they have no place in this moment of defeat.

Yes, _defeat_.

Even after all they’ve done, after all they’ve accomplished, they have _failed_.

Eren’s heartbeat is a crushing tempo of distress.

Together they all disarm themselves, they begin removing their maneuver gear—him, Jean, Marco, Mina, Conny, Sasha, Armin… It’s over. They have lost. The shame is already rising like a fever through Eren’s veins. It is a cold and hopeless pain. He is not one to give up. Surely, surely there is another way—another plan, another angle, something, anything—he will make these men pay—and if he does it alone, so be it—he is remembering suddenly in gory detail the way it felt to drive a knife into a bad man’s chest, in, in, and in again, human bodies so soft, so fleshy, so ripe with blood like a berry bursting between thumb and forefinger, _evil_ , and after the first stab it had just been so easy, it had been so just, the memory is twitching in Eren’s fingertips, it is crawling up his skin hair by hair—

No, there are no birds singing in the trees, but there are soldiers, and they come spinning down from the sunrise like angels of death, one slashing away the gun from the thieves’ obvious leader, the other freeing Christa from the bandit with the earring.

Flash of color smearing through the early morning— _red_.

“Mikasa!” Eren cries.

Relief floods through him. No, something more powerful than relief, something more dependable. _Victory_. Doubt is banished. Failure is not certain. Mikasa is here, and Annie, and their razor-sharp ultrahard steel is slicing through the air towards the bandits’ throats, they have _won_.

“Don’t kill them!” Christa shrieks.

The only birds that scatter from the ringing voice are blackbirds, of course, from their front-row roosts waiting for breakfast.

Annie and Mikasa do not kill the thieves.

In a wave of sunlight, the rest of their team stumbles forth. Reiner, Thomas, Berthold, Daz—

Young soldiers rejoice.

Eren grabs for Armin, holds him tight. It is finally sinking in to him the gravity of this entire night. His fingers tighten in Armin’s soft hair; he hides his face in Armin’s shoulder. It is all he can do for an apology. He is afraid that if he tries to talk, he will cry, because if not for Armin, what might have happened? Eren grabs for Marco, waves him into the embrace. Sasha joins, pressing kisses to Armin’s hair and cheeks. Conny makes it a vertical dog pile. Mina wriggles her way in. If not for Armin’s smart thinking, if not for Marco’s smooth leadership, if not for Sasha’s wilderness skills, if not for Conny and Mina’s support and ingenuity, if not— Everyone is tousling Eren’s hair, they’re all talking at once, they’re saying, “You did it! We did it!”

The brink of death and disaster proves to be the most pivotal place in the world.

Voices jump and climb over one another as the thieves are tied up with their own rope and the two training teams exchange stories.

Jean seats Christa on a log just off the side of the mountain road; he stoops to his knees before her, drapes his jacket over hers because she is tiny and shivering. The blood has dried on the apple of Jean’s cheek. He stands; he meets Eren’s eyes over his shoulder. And Eren knows exactly what it means.

Jean moves off into the trees behind the wagon wreckage.

Eren waits, but he’s too impatient, he doesn’t know what’s waiting long enough, he scampers into the early morning dew after Jean.

Jean surprises him. He is a silhouette amongst silhouettes; he grabs Eren’s arm and Eren almost cries out but Jean is too soon crushing him to his chest in a desperate embrace. Jean pulls, he stumbles back a step or two against a towering pine, and Eren buries into him, fingers tightening in his dirty shirt.

They stand there in the dawn, breathing hard, sharing the shakes of fading action. Eren lifts his head and lets his lashes flutter shut as Jean meets him in the middle with a deep, tender kiss, passing sighs back and forth, clutching tighter, tighter, love bites and recompense.

“You fucking scared me.” Jean’s whisper drips off his lower lip onto Eren’s tongue.

“I’m sorry…” Eren gasps, impatiently, but he means it, he just doesn’t want to talk, he wants their kisses to do the talking for them. He’ll get enough of the lecture from Mikasa in a few.

“Don’t you have any remorse? Any fear? At all?”

“No. I wanted to protect you guys.”

“Let me see your face—Jesus, it’s so bad already—”

“What, my bruise?”

“Yeah, babe…”

 _Babe_.

Eren locks his arms around Jean and buries his face so tight into the nape of his neck that he can’t see anything, can’t hear anything, can only breathe in the scent of sweat and hair and familiar flesh. He is desperate to touch and be touched, something precious had been so close to being ripped away without warning.

They’d better get used to it, this danger, this fear for each other, fear of loss. It’s a deniable reality no longer.

They are soldiers, after all.

“Jean—” It’s Marco, weaving through the trees and brush. Jean unravels quickly from Eren and Eren begrudgingly steps to the side, scrubbing at his face all too soon before remembering how much it hurts. Marco puts a hand on his shoulder, still talking to Jean. “I’m going with Reiner to get Shadis. We think one of you two should come, too—”

Jean goes.

“How’s your ankle holding up?” His voice is drifting away.

“Fine. Fine, actually. I’m okay.” Marco’s is, too. They stomp through the foliage, leaving Eren behind. He stays in the shadows for a moment or two, just listening. Feeling. Breathing. The forest might swallow him. He hates being alone in the forest. He is coldly alert but exhausted and it’s the strangest thing to feel both at the same time. He wants to curl up between Armin and Mikasa and maybe eat something and then go to sleep for the rest of the day. He slips back out to the campsite everyone’s setting up to wait.

The thieves are properly restrained. Annie can tie a mean executioner’s knot. Christa is still wearing Jean’s jacket over her own. She is on horseback with Reiner, sitting in front of him like royalty. She looks tired, too, but clearheaded. She catches Eren’s gaze before they take off for training camp. She smiles at him. She mouths, “Thank you.” Eren shrugs and blushes and looks away. Mikasa lets him rest his eyes against her shoulder, running her fingers through his hair like his mother used to.

The MP is brought in from the northwest; the bandits are taken into custody.

“I should never have accepted the team leader role,” Marco sighs with a smile but all the air of heavy guilt. He passes Eren a pewter cup of steaming coffee, joining him in the lookout tower near the refectory back on training grounds.

“What?” Eren scowls at him sideways. “You’re a perfect leader.”

Marco laughs. He is so much taller than Eren, but his crooked grin is so soft and honest. He toasts their coffee, clinking their cups together. Eren laughs and returns the gesture. “No,” Marco laments. “I’m not. Jean would have been better.”

“Jean?” Eren snorts. “No way.”

Marco shakes his head. “You’ll see it soon.”

“What does _that_ mean?” Eren rolls his eyes around dramatically to meet Marco’s. But he rears back, startled, because Marco’s smile is gone and Marco is looking at him like he _knows_ , like he can see every one of Eren’s secrets crucified to his soul. A moment of silence passes between them, an impasse of sorts, an unspoken concession. Eren wants to say, “I think I know a little more about Jean than you…” But he doesn’t. And not because it’s rude or flirting with coming out, but because it’s wrong.

It is _wrong_.

It hits him suddenly, gawking at Marco, that Marco knows Jean better somehow. And what that means, Eren isn’t sure. But it makes him a little nervous. It makes him feel a little shitty.

Flustered, Eren turns away and slouches down on the wooden railing, sipping at his coffee with a dark frown.

Marco shrugs. “Armin says he has a feeling it was all part of the excursion, that it was some kind of drill,” he changes the subject glibly.

“Yeah,” Eren grunts. “And Shadis _still_ expects full reports from us all.”

* * *

**end ch. v  
**


	6. no one's here to sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren smothers. Everyone knows they've been frequenting the chapel. Reiner KNOWS knows. It is the final trials of training. “There you go with your roundabout declarations of love,” Sasha hums, winking at Jean. There is a dawning dread casting its shadow over Jean from behind, and Jean is loath to turn and see from just whence it has spawned. Eren’s eyes are wide and abysmal; here there is a glimmer of the baby-faced fanatic he’d been years ago at first roll call in the yard. Something is going to break. Someone is going to break. What are they going to do once they graduate? “Don’t fucking leave me...”

vi. NO ONE'S HERE TO SLEEP

* * *

 

“You’re smothering me,” Jean mumbles into Eren’s shoulder on the third night in one week that Eren has snuck down into his bunk with him.

“What?” Eren snaps back, and Jean covers his mouth quickly with a weary sigh, closing his eyes like he has to gather patience. But nobody wakes up. Nobody ever wakes up. Or they pretend they don’t.

“Look, if someone finds out… We’ll get kicked out, for sure. And that’ll put a kink in your plans to kill all the titans, won’t it?”

“Yeah,” Eren grumbles, “you’re right. God forbid I fuck up your chances of MP.”

Eren dwells on this.

“Do I smother?” he asks Mikasa over breakfast, hunching across the table to keep the conversation the low and secretive hum of conspiracy. Mikasa looks up with a piece of fried egg balanced perfectly on her fork, cocking a dainty brow.

“What?” she prompts. “Smother?”

“Yeah.” Eren shrugs. “Do I smother?”

“No,” Armin chimes in. “If anything, you freak us the fuck out sometimes.”

“What he said.” Mikasa takes a bite of food with a scrape of her teeth on the fork. “You get _clingy_. That’s different from smothering. I think.”

“Why are you asking, Eren?” Armin frowns. “Are you worried you’re smothering us?”

“You’re not smothering us,” Mikasa scoffs, like this is actually an impossibility.

“So I don’t get what you mean when you say I’m _smothering_ you,” Eren insists to Jean, in the dark of the Wallist chapel behind the main training offices, as Jean pulls on his pants and rolls his eyes and Eren leans back against the prayer cushions still in just his shorts and still throbbing a little inside from the sex. His pants are balled up under his arm.

“Look.” Jean utters a hissing sigh, standing with his back to Eren, his shoulders drawn, his head hung, his hands raking through his hair like he’s trying to tame it from sex hair to acceptable bedhead. He casts Eren a guarded glance over his shoulder, frowning bitterly. “You’re my sun and my moon,” he whispers miserably, and somehow it does not feel like a compliment. It feels kind of like an accusation. “I just… I have to be careful not to care too much and you make that really fucking hard.”

Eren is pretty damn confused. He gestures wildly, face twisting in defiance. “What do you mean, you can’t care? What are you, a sociopath?”

Jean wilts dramatically, rolling his eyes. He is still flushed from fucking Eren on the floor of the chapel and it is delicious, the feel of his body still buzzes on Eren’s skin, but he’s a little perturbed now and he hates fighting after good sex.

“You could be gone tomorrow,” Jean tries to explain, avoiding eye contact.

Eren scoffs. He snorts. He rolls his eyes and climbs to his feet and winces because there’s still a little bit of come oozing down his thigh. He huffs indignantly and throws his pants at Jean. Jean throws them back, dubiously.

“So I’m not actually smothering you, you’re just afraid of commitment,” Eren translates, wriggling into his pants now.

“Okay, no.” Jean shakes his head, jabs a finger, props a hand on his hip then seems to realize just how worked up he’s getting for someone who allegedly can’t care too much. “No,” he says again, firmly, but it is not at all argumentative. It is resigned. “I’m not afraid of commitment.”

Eren gets it.

He doesn’t push any more buttons about it.

Jean is not afraid of commitment; he is _averse_ to commitment, and to caring, and that is very different. That is understandable. Eren has seen it with Jean’s mother, anyway. It’s not ungrounded, either. But it’s not relatable to him. He wears his flaws on his sleeve; Jean tries to keep his flaws buried beneath the ground. And Eren is so impatient with it.

“Do you wanna practice for the final trials later?” Eren suggests.

“Sure,” Jean husks dispassionately.

“Jean, I’m not going anywhere,” Eren snaps.

“Yeah, okay. So you say. All the time. Well, you don’t know that.”

“One day we all die anyway—”

“Eren, stop. I’m done talking about it.”

“So you might as well take what you can when you can get it.”

“Wow, that’s _so_ romantic of you.”

“It’s not fair that caring about me hurts you. If it hurts you, I don’t want you to care. But I _do_ want you to care—”

Jean kisses him to shut him up. Eren acquiesces, glancing away in apology. God, he just wants to protect him. But Jean’s sad eyes are gone and his sarcastic eyes are back and he makes Eren leave the chapel first again.

“I like to watch you walk away,” he teases. “I think, ‘Yeah, I just tapped that.’”

Eren laughs. He makes sure to walk a little taller, a little stronger, a little hotter as he leaves, just for Jean to see.

* * *

It is the semi-final trial of the week-long final Aptitude Trials, horseback drills and target-shooting and logistics formations and written exams on history, military strategies, titan physiology, timed mechanical tests, armed and unarmed combat, footwork and obstacle courses and now, _finally_ , now, the graded maneuver gear targeting in the woods with the giant wooden “titans” and their soft canvas necks, marked with dancing lines to measure just how precise the finishing blow is dealt while Shadis watches on in his daunting icy way, Assistant Instructor recording all his comments.

Jean is confident he exceeded cadet expectations. The maneuver gear is his favorite; he outrivals over half the training squad. Or so an instructor told him not so long ago. Sasha threw him off a little during the trial, but he’s pretty sure he kicked ass.

His team takes over for the previous team on the little platforms in the trees with the ropes and pulleys, which move the eerie trial dummies like actual titans will.

“You did great,” Marco says.

“Thanks,” Jean grunts, still shaking a little.

“Hey!” Conny calls from the platform across the clearing, a bouncing bundle of leftover nerves.

“What?” Jean calls back.

“You’ve been going to the chapel a lot recently,” Conny says. “Are you prayingor something?”

“No!” Jean snorts, almost chokes on a negation. “No. I mean, I haven’t been going to the chapel, what are you talking about?”

Beside Conny, Reiner laughs so hard his trial titan shakes and rattles on the thick rope. He interjects impishly, “Uh _huhhh!_ ” complete with kiss-blowing and a crude, admittedly subtle, thrust or two of the hips for proper implication in case Jean didn’t get the hint from the start. Jean has gotten the hint from the start. Reiner drawls from the platform, “The chapel and the kitchen and the—”

“I don’t know, you and Bert spend an awful lot of time in the storage sheds, maybe _you two are fucking each other in the ass, shut up, Reiner, you piece of shit_ —”

Jean’s cool reply just utterly deteriorates into shouting so hard he feels like a toddler throwing a tantrum because Reiner just keeps laughing and laughing and then he’s pointing a blade at Jean with a playful pout, shaking his head very slowly.

Conny jumps a little, watching Reiner. “Really? You and Bert, huh?” He doesn’t believe it; it’s obvious. He’s playing along like it’s a joke. It’s not a joke. It’s that Reiner walked in on Jean and Eren ripping away very suspiciously from kissing each other _one fucking time_ and then Eren confessed he’d walked in on Reiner and Berthold and Eren and Reiner had struck a deal right there, a pact, a handshake and a hall, in front of Bert and Jean as witnesses, _they had a deal_ not to bring it up, to keep it a secret, to protect each other’s secrets kind of like double blackmail masquerading as amnesty.

“One time,” Jean mouths very deliberately, brandishing an index finger at Reiner.  

Reiner waves in apology and Marco elbows Jean hard in the side. Jean is sure Marco will reprimand him for not being careful, because Jean already told Marco all about it, but Marco doesn’t say anything of the sort. He nods off into the distance. He says, “Here they come…”

It’s Eren and Mikasa, a gust of air and whine of gas, hiss-pop of grapple pistons and the chattering metallic buzz of following maneuver lines.

Mikasa is so graceful. There’s a killer beauty in her moves, in her attacks, that seems rather tired of simple trials and examinations. Everything she does is precise, premeditated maybe, _perfect_. And it’s a tragedy and a mystery how such a beautiful girl could seem to have been made with such destructive proficiency. No, _destructive_ is not the right word. _Destructive_ is Eren. _Prowess_ is the word for Mikasa. She and Annie are like titan-killing queens.

“ _Aaaugh!_ ”

Eren possesses a grace that is vitally _different_ from Mikasa’s. He is passion incarnate; he is muscle, and growling, and bloodlust. He is rough and yet somehow poised in baffling concurrence and there is a spin to his movements that may or may not be accidental. Either he is out of control, or this is the one time and place he is in complete control.

Yes, he is a soldier. _He is a warrior_. And Jean is staring but he doesn’t care. He can vaguely overhear Shadis speaking for the recording instructor:

“Jäger…Grisha’s son…close combat…slowly but steadily improving his grades…outstanding effort…strongest sense of purpose I’ve seen in years…”

Shadis should take note: Eren is raw irrational brilliance, undiluted, unthwarted; there is a thin line between madness and genius and Eren plays jump rope with that line. Staring at Eren is like staring into the sun. They say it blinds, but men do it anyway. Suicidal bastard. Beautiful, loving, crazy, perfect suicidal bastard.

(Shadis doesn’t need to note that part.)

“That was _low_ ,” Jean tells Sasha, after the trials, near the storage shed amongst the evergreens and pinecones and rustling ferns as the carts are loaded up and water is passed around for successful cadets.

“Low?” Sasha echoes, veritably pouting.

“You stole that first target!” Jean reminds.

“There’s no manners in hunting!” Sasha singsongs.

“Yeah, it’s your fault for letting it _get_ stolen,” Conny joins in.

“Okay, we all did great,” Marco mediates. “And nobody got hurt, either. Those trees are so dense, aren’t they—”

“Hey,” Eren interrupts, stealing the water from Jean for a long drink. “Marco, you did the exact opposite.”

“What?” Marco frowns.

“You found all the targets first but you’d leave them for someone else,” Eren points out. “Why? You need really high scores to get into the MP. Why risk it?”

Marco shrugs. Marco falters, brow knotting above a dimpled smile. “I don’t know, I just… I’m slow. I’ve been thinking about real battle situations lately. And I decided that I shouldn’t be upset I’m slow—because I am, nobody argue that, I know I’m slow—I’ve been thinking maybe that’s to the advantage of my team. I can distract titans while my team attacks.”

“Second-in-command, right?” Jean grins, taking water instead from Sasha, a peace offering, and toasting to Marco’s selflessness.

Marco laughs. “Second-in-command,” he echoes.

Eren scowls. He knows he’s missing something here. Jean feels bad, but he doesn’t feel bad enough to get stuck on it.

“You sound like a natural leader to me,” Eren argues defiantly. “Eye for detail, efficiency… I’d totally be on your team, Marco.”

“Me, too!” Sasha chimes in.

Marco is blushing and flustered, laughing, shaking his head.

“Count me in,” Jean teases in turn. “Though we might have to discuss membership qualification. We can’t afford having any suicidal assholes on our team.”

It takes Eren a moment to catch on. “Wait a minute, what—”

“There you go with your roundabout declarations of love,” Sasha hums, winking at Jean.

 _Roundabout declarations of love_ , huh?

Jean strokes his knuckles along the side of Eren’s face, curled up with him in Eren’s bunk for once. There’s a loose spring that creaks and whines as Jean idly wags his foot. Everything smells like Eren here—the pillow, the sheets, the blanket. They are alone. They’ve left the lamp dark. Voices and good cheer echo up from the lounge downstairs, from outside in the quad where the instructors are hosting a small celebratory bonfire. Conny’s out there, playing his dumb little folk guitar. Chanting voices sing Utopian epics.

Eren traces the outline of Jean’s face with a warm finger, lashes lowered on drowsy amber eyes. He is peaceful; he is soft. He is tender to hold and compliant to nuzzle and his kisses are sweet and studded with loving chuckles. Jean can feel his heart beating under his palm, hot powerful thud. At any sign of life outside the forgotten dormitory room, in the hall, they roll away from one another—and promptly roll back into each other the moment all’s clear again.

Jean nips at Eren’s thumb. Eren snickers. “Stop, it tickles,” he whines.

“Is it just me, or is it kind of awkward now?”

The smile fades from Eren’s face faster than the sun can fall behind storm clouds. But the shadow that eclipses him is not one of anger; no, it’s something altogether more vulnerable, a little dimple between his thick dark brows, a quiver of the light in his wide spirited eyes.

“What?” he prompts. “What’s awkward?”

Jean shrugs, still stroking his hand along Eren’s jawline, petting the ridge of his nose with an idle thumb. _Now_ the stubborn defiance sets in, and Eren swats Jean’s hand away, scrutinizing him with a tiny frown. Jean heaves a sigh. He realizes it sounded odd. He lets his hand settle instead on Eren’s neck, loving the heat there, the life.

“Things just feel… _different_ ,” he tries to elaborate.

“Between us?” Eren pries. It is both endearing and annoying to Jean that his mind always goes to their precarious, inexplicable little romance.

“No,” Jean says firmly. He waits for Eren to meet his eyes and trust that it’s the truth. Eren’s heart rate is climbing; Jean can feel it under his palm, in his throat. “Because we’ll be graduating soon, and…” Jean finally clarifies, voice thick in his throat. “It’ll be over.”

It’s kind of frightening, after all.

It’s kind of weird after four grueling years here. It’s kind of exciting but mostly horrifying because it is probably going to make all this seem like a fucking daydream. He’s king of the castle here; he is comfortable, and proud, and safe. But after the disbanding ceremony, he won’t even be castling the king. He’ll just be a pawn for God knows how long.

It’s a time of peace, sure. Nothing has happened since the fall of Maria, humanity is resilient, society is refortifying itself.

But there is a dawning dread casting its shadow over Jean from behind, and Jean is loath to turn and see from just whence it has spawned.

Eren mimics Jean’s hands, gently caressing the sides of Jean’s throat. His brow knots and he looks so noble, so sympathetic, so…disconnected from reality.

“It doesn’t have to be,” he whispers, and sometimes—sometimes—Eren just does not get what Jean means. Jean does not hold it against him. He has accepted these as facts (a lesson Eren might benefit from one day). Eren cranes forward, still holding Jean’s neck, fingertips nudging gently at Jean’s jawline. He presses a paper-thin, reassuring kiss to Jean’s lips, holding there for a moment, and Jean is glad because he basks in the sensory bliss.

“But it will be,” Jean counters.

“No, it won’t be,” Eren argues. “Stop being so cynical, egg-head. It’s not like we’ll never see each other again just because we’re in different branches of the military. And when we _do_ see each other, I’m totally down with…you know, a string of reunions…”

He nudges a knee between Jean’s and Jean laughs. He doesn’t mean to; it’s not funny. The proposition is utter serious and somewhat grim and a little sad at the core. Is all of this just loneliness in the face of reality, is there ever anything more at all? Jean sighs, running his fingers through Eren’s hair like Eren likes him to.

“I don’t mean us,” he says for a second time, in a second way.

“Then what do you mean?” Eren whispers, shivering in Jean’s touch, leaning into it like a cat seeking affection and promptly blushing when he realizes Jean noticed. “What’ll be ‘over?’”

“Happiness.” Jean clears his throat. “Safety,” he corrects.

Pity dimples Eren’s face.

But he does not try to argue these things.

He quietly lets Jean kiss him, moving his lips a little but not really kissing back very much. When Jean opens his eyes, he finds Eren staring straight at him. Jean pulls away and into a dubious frown.

“What?” he grunts, licking the taste of Eren’s half-kisses off his lips.

“Really, though,” Eren won’t let it go, “what arewe gonna do after the disbanding ceremony?”

“Choose our branches,” Jean reminds noncommittally.

“No.” Eren’s eyes are wide and abysmal; here there is a glimmer of the baby-faced fanatic he’d been years ago at first roll call in the yard. “ _Us_ ,” he stresses.

“What you said,” Jean grumbles, rubbing his nose back and forth along Eren’s and wishing he wasn’t such an obsessive, thoughtless, beautiful little saint. “When we see each other, if we see each other, if we do things, well, we’ll do things—”

“And if you get a girlfriend?”

“I won’t get a girlfriend.”

“Or a boyfriend?”

“I don’t…think I’ll get a boyfriend.”

“You don’t know.”

“I won’t have time for those things.”

“You’re right, you won’t be in the Garrison so you won’t be slacking off.”  

Jean chuckles, closing his eyes. Eren nudges at him again, drives his knee roughly up against Jean’s balls—a love tap, not enough to hurt, but enough to startle. Jean chuckles again, tongue between his teeth. But he pops his eyes open and raises his brows as if to say, _You rang?_

“I don’t care if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, if we don’t see each other for months after this, or years, I’m still gonna jump your bones the first time I see you,” Eren swears like it’s a holy oath.

“Don’t let me distract you from your goals,” Jean reprimands. He waits. Eren is waiting, too. Jean gives in, laughing again, running his hand up and down Eren’s side now, up under his shirt, following silky tan skin from nipple to jutting hipbone. “It’s not like we’ll never see each other again,” he comforts. “You know that, right?” He needs to change the subject. There’s an obvious echo of commitment or farewell here in this conversation and he isn’t sure what he might say and regret later.

“You’re crazy, Eren,” he says instead. “I’m trying so hard to keep up with you.”

“What do you mean, keep up with me?” Eren mumbles. “You mean with sex? Or am I smothering you again? Or—you mean the Corps and everything—”

Jean holds a finger to his mouth, sighing through his teeth. “Just… Be quiet for a second. For like five minutes. Okay? You’re just so much all at once and I just need a tiny bit of room to breathe…” He gives Eren’s ass a tiny friendly smack.

But he cannot sleep without Eren breathing and he cannot breathe without Eren sleeping beside him and this is terrifying him. Change is icing down the back of his neck, it’s a storm cloud on the horizon and Jean is so afraid of it. The 104th is about to disband. Things are going to change. They are going to change beyond his control.

Fear does different things to him than to Eren, though. He knows that.

Fear invigorates Eren.

Fear destroys Jean.

Eren can’t stay quiet for very long. He shoves his face in Jean’s shoulder to muffle an overzealous roar. “I can’t fucking wait!” he says into Jean’s arm. “I’m so fucking excited!”

“For what?” Jean laughs.

“To go outside the walls!”

Jean’s smile slips, but doesn’t fall all the way away. He slides his thumb up and down the back of Eren’s neck, loving the way it feels to lie this close together, heat and smell of Eren swallowing him whole in the dark. “Is that it?”

“Yeah…” Eren wriggles around, lifting his chin to meet Jean’s eyes. And for once in his life he looks meek and unassertive. He whispers, “I want to see the sea.”

The final trial is a battle simulation, and it is tomorrow. Friends and dorm-mates are drifting in for sleep. They need to break apart again for the night.

* * *

The Official 104th Disbanding Ceremony has the streets of Trost all done up and ready to party.

Three hundred and fifty military cadets march.

“We have paid a terrible price for our century of peace! Even as we speak, there’s a chance the Colossal Titan might tear down Wall Rose and come at us at any second! When that time comes, it will be your duty to oppose the titan threat! You will sacrifice your all!”

Three hundred and fifty military cadets salute.

“ _Sir!_ ”

Mikasa Ackerman, Reiner Braun, Berthold Fubar, Annie Leonhardt, Eren Jäger, Jean Kirschtein, Marco Bodt, Conny Springer, Sasha Braus, Christa Lenz— _the top ten graduates_.

Three hundred and fifty military cadets stand at attention.

They have made it. It’s humanity’s time, now. Mankind will feast upon the titans.

“Tomorrow you will apply for your branch of choice! Today marks the disbanding of the 104th Training. On to the ceremony!”

“ _Sir!_ ”

They are assigned dorms just outside city hall.

The Graduation Banquet preparations are well under way; they have a few hours to roam Trost on their own.

“Hey—” Jean throws his jacket over his shoulder and leans casually in the doorway of Eren’s dorm, free hand in one hip pocket. God, but he is handsome. Eren doesn’t mean to melt into a smile; apparently it’s quite a sight because Franz and Bert are exchanging glances about it as they throw their bags onto their bunks. Jean clears his throat, raises his brows at Eren. “Come with me.”

They wander through the evening markets of the southernmost district. It’s no Jour des Morts procession or Koliada season, but petals are strewn by little children in town square, ribbons wound around a traditional maypole. The children have no idea what the red petals stand for. _Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, monsters, monsters, the walls won’t fall!_

The walls tower in the distance, the great august mythical walls.

Jean leads the way through the streets he knows, winding alleys and tiny private courtyards filled with flowering dogwood and glowing lanterns. One even has a little moss-kissed fountain. Laundry’s strung between squat wrought-iron balconies, garlands and draperies in the peeling windows. It’s not quite nostalgia Eren feels, but it’s something soft and sore— _home_. Family. Life. Peace. Not his, but still there.

Music echoes from some open-air restaurant across the street. A man is closing up his print shop next door. And Jean takes Eren to his house.

Eren stands awkwardly to the side, examining trinkets and wall hangings near the front door while Jean and his mother have a little reunion with all the expected fluff and loving exclamations.

“Look at you, you’re so tall!”

“I was this tall last time I came, Ma.”

“No, you weren’t! _Look at you_ , you’re a man!”

“I wanted to say hi while I had free time.”

“Do I get to see you at your recruitment?”

“No, Ma… Not really.”

“But you’ll be in town for a while?”

“I’ll come by tomorrow. Recruitment isn’t until evening. We tour the walls first, and the Garrison stations…”

“And who’s this?” Jean’s mom whispers. Jean _is_ taller than his mother. She has to tip her head back to look at him, her ash-brown hair pulled into a loose chignon, as Jean looks down at her with an uncertain smile. It’s a scene worthy of painting, a moment worth capturing forever: soldier boy and his mother. Jean gets his eyes from her, it’s pretty obvious. Maybe her humorous expressions, too.

“Ah…” Jean shrugs limply, like it’s no big deal. “A friend.”

“From training?”

“From training.”

“You’re making friends again?”

Jean flinches at this unsympathetic peek into his personal life. “Yeah,” he grumbles. But he doesn’t need to be embarrassed. Eren isn’t very good at making friends, either.

Jean shows him his old room; his mom insists on making a pot of tea. But Eren has a hunch Jean meant to show him his old room all along.

It’s like a tomb—a tomb of childhood in here. It’s a little stuffy and a little uncomfortable.

The door is closed and Jean looks mighty fine in his dark vest and cotton shirt as he lays Eren flat on the bed with hunched shoulders, soft kisses, fluttering lashes. The bed squeaks. It hasn’t borne any weight in a while, it seems.

“I figured this was better than trying to sneak around city hall,” he explains in that uncomfortable mumbling way of his that means he’s trying to play it cool but is really hoping it means something to Eren.

It does.

The tea Jean’s mom brings is forgotten on an empty wardrobe. The lights from the city at night bleed through curtainless windows. Jean’s mom doesn’t even ask questions or try to talk to Eren; Eren kind of gets the feeling that Jean told her something when he went to get the tea from her, maybe something like, “His mom is gone. He’s having a hard time.” Something to buy them some privacy.

Eren doesn’t care either way.

Jean is kissing down his neck so softly, so tenderly. He is on top of him on the bed he used to sleep in and Eren is distracted for a moment by the wooden horse on the wardrobe, probably a childhood toy. A tiny oil painting of baby Jean and _both_ his parents. A comb. Some hair wax. And then Jean’s hand goes down the front of his pants and Eren is pulled back into focus.

It’s slow, lazy fondling—wandering fingers, gentle kisses, a warm comfortable kind of lust, hips rolling, bodies shivering, just-silent-enough moans drifting between the lips of one mouth and into the other. Jean’s mouth is hot and wet on Eren’s cheek and throat and then on his dick. His heart is jumping; his stomach is in knots. Every hair on his arms and legs stands on end and he’s already kicked off his shoes downstairs, by Jean’s mom’s shoes, his toes curl in his socks, his shorts and his pants tangled on one ankle and—

_If my mom was alive or my dad was around, they’d fucking love you._

_You’d bring me home to dinner?_

_She’d say, ‘Take your shoes off. Take as much bread as you want—’ And she’d ask you all about your family, and how we met. Maybe she’d say Mikasa has to chaperone us. Maybe she’d say that hopefully having a boyfriend will keep me from joining the Survey Corps._

Eren lets Jean come inside him, tries to keep his legs together to keep from staining the blankets of an unused bed, but Jean’s kissing him hard afterwards, kissing him hard and deep like he usually does after sex, like he’s in disbelief or he’s in love or he just can’t get enough and his knee slides between Eren’s naked legs and Eren sighs into his kisses. But soon they’re just buzzing in the warmth of a leisurely comedown, and Eren’s fingers smell like Jean’s cock and that’s okay. He feels disheveled and dazed, sleepy and content.

Jean’s still kissing him. Eren doesn’t really kiss back now. He’s too busy looking up at the ceiling over the bed, thinking that this ceiling is the same ceiling Jean used to stare at. This is the same bed Jean used to sleep in. Jean’s memories are part of this room like the grain in the wood, in the wall moulding. And he kind of gets the feeling that Jean is trying to share family with him, or trying to share _his_ family with him. It is touching, whatever it is. He is so sweet. He is so fucking sweet. Eren is so head over heels for this guy. The sea inside is swirling, churning, becoming a whirlpool endeavoring to suck him under. This is torturous, dangerous. He doesn’t want it to go away.

“Don’t fucking leave me,” Eren husks.

Jean is a silhouette hovering above him suddenly, eyes flashing in the dark. “What?”

Eren swallows hard on a lump that’s jumped to his throat and starts pulling up his pants. “Don’t join the Military Police.”

Jean is still and mute for a moment. He’s bristled for a fight. But then the fight seems to wash out of him in a hissing sigh and he rolls his eyes, sits up and starts refastening his pants, searching for his shirt. “I’m going to. I want to. We both have our goals, Eren.”

“Well, your goal is bullshit.”

“ _Your_ goal is bullshit.”

“Please don’t join the MP.”

Something’s changing.

“Look, if you really wanna put your life even more on the line than it already is, that’s your thing. But I plan on staying alive as long as I can. I _told_ you, it doesn’t mean we have to stop doing stuff like this, trust me, I want to keep doing it, I do, but… It’ll just be different timing now—”

He feels sort of far away from him. _I love you_ burns on Eren’s tongue. But for Jean, Jean who _can’t care too much_ , for Jean’s sake, he does not say it.

“You’re only joining the MP because Marco’s joining the MP.”

He is afraid of being without him. But he is also afraid it isn’t good to be around him. He loses his focus. Eren can’t make the words stop. He is trying to find reasons to justify this sudden gap between them, these places where they just fail to see eye to eye, where they fail to find the important words or the courage to speak them. He has always known Jean’s aim was the MP. Why is he fighting it now?

“That’s not fucking true, Eren, and if you don’t shut up we’re gonna be late to the party—”

“You’re so fucking selfish.”

“Not everyone can be a fucking hero like you!” Jean spits, and there is nothing of praise in it. It is an insult, pure and true.

Eren sits up sharply, grabbing Jean hard and kissing him harder, kissing him, kissing him. And even with as much as Eren’s picking on him, Jean kisses him back. Biting, bruising, _begging_.

They rest forehead to forehead, avoiding eye contact. The touch is enough. They sit hunched together in the shadows of Jean’s old room. They are both fashioned out of tragedies but their inner blueprints take different turns and corners. This is a crossroads; Eren can taste it in the kisses. Tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of their lives and they are clashing because they handle this crushing pressure in very different, very personal ways. Like death drives people apart, so does the death of a small forever.

Eren is aching like never before inside. “You’ll be great in the MP,” he whispers raggedly.

Jean relaxes in his hands, kisses his nose. But Eren does not respond because Eren does not mean it as an apology or a truce.

“I don’t need you with me in the Survey Corps,” Eren goes on. His breath is picking up; his heart is pounding. He lifts his eyes without lifting his head and he fixes Jean in a cold stare of resolution. “Go to the MP. You’re not the point of my life. The point of my life is to kill all the titans.”

He is relentless. He is _logos_. He is utterly serious.

Jean will slow him down, distract him; Jean will not keep up with him. There festers between them irreconcilable cosmic dreams and, too stubborn to accept defeat or too stubborn to vocalize support, either they accept that disparity unconditionally or not.

And—somehow—it’s like Jean knows that he is telling himself this more than he is telling Jean.

Like Jean knows the real fragile meaning behind words picked to bruise but will keep it buried deep inside. Like Jean knows this is Eren’s madman version of _can’t care too much_ , a little sharper than Jean pushing him away to ease predicted pain, a little crueler than Jean’s feigned indifference for fear of being alone, but recognizable all the same.

He does not want to hold Eren back.

Eren wants to hate him for it.

He fucking _can’t_.

Jean does not look offended. He looks, in fact, like he’s expected this one day. He asks weakly, the words stinging Eren with their peace, “So everything and everyone comes second to you, to that dream?”

“Yeah,” Eren spits.

It’s not meant as malice. It is the truth. It is the sum of his wild, honest soul. Maybe it’s a little unbalanced; maybe _he’s_ a little unbalanced. He’s never claimed to be a saint. And if he ends up alone for this dream of his, so be it. But if he doesn’t, well… That means the ones he loves with no reserves love him back enough to keep up with him.

“I’m destined for it,” Eren whispers thickly, a small white flag in the face of irresoluble differences. He’s not practiced at explaining himself. He’s never felt it’s necessary until right now, very briefly.

Jean squints at Eren in the dark like he knows him all too well by now, like he pities him for being born a hero.  

And Eren aches so deep for the distance between them on this, a brilliant mortal pain, that it hurts to breathe.

“We’ll be late,” Jean reminds. He cups a hand on the back of Eren’s neck and kisses his forehead. He does not say anything else.

God damn it, Eren burns for him so fiercely.

But the fire is gone from Jean’s eyes.

The lamps of Trost city hall bob like captured stars in the night. Streamers and banners wave in the cobbled streets—greens, blues, silver, reds, the colors of all the military. The Survey Corps is out on expedition but high officials of the other two branches are in town for tomorrow’s recruitment; they are enjoying their own galas in the ornamented mansions of bankers and lawyers and Estate nobles while the recently-graduated soldiers celebrate in city hall. Weird, to have heroes and role models so close and yet so far.

Everyone is wearing their nicest clothes and drinking way too much way too fast—beer, spiced wine, distilled spirits. There is roast joint and chocolate croissants and sweet fruits and candied nuts, and bread and cheese and fresh jams, olive oil, vinegar. The windows are open for the cool night breeze; singing echoes down the cobbled streets. Eren sits with Armin and Mikasa, and Reiner. Jean sits with Marco and Berthold and Annie.

In city hall, everyone is talking. The voices rise and crash like a sea. There is laughter and shouting. Stories are being told. Nostalgia is a contagious plague. Praise is given; friendly heckles echo; celebration resounds and pride and tipsy triumph rise to the ceiling.

“A life of peace and comfort on the interior!” Jean is pounding on the table like a man out for revolution.

“Show some decency!” Marco cries.

“Whatever, Mr. Honor Student!”

“You scored higher than me—”

“Second-in-command!”

“ _Second-in-command!_ ”

“Hey!” Eren snorts. “Your _mom_ lives here in Trost, Jean-bo!”

Jean jabs a finger. “Who fucking told you about my nickname?”

“You’d leave your _mom_ all alone out here for the titans?”

“Oh great,” someone bemoans, “here come the mommy issues again—”

This is a grand night, a night to revel. They are all starry-eyed and fresh. This is the night to end one chapter of their lives and begin a new one. Someone is playing music. People are drunk and dancing. Nobody wants to admit that they might never see each other again, friends and lovers and comrades. This is a _disbanding_ , after all. This is closure, scattering, separation, this is _ending_ cleverly masked as merriment, but no amount of gaiety has the power to cut away the poisonous vines of unavoidable sorrow that have taken root beneath the cheer.

Tomorrow they face reality, and whatever has been reality up until tonight will be real no longer.

Eren and Jean are not dancing.

They are drunk and they are fighting again—injustice, lack of closure, the whisper of separate tomorrows souring the fragile armistice from Jean’s old room. The same overwhelming pressure of _change_ that drives Mina to cry with her girlfriends and Conny to laugh too loudly out of nerves and everyone else to pretend they’re not secretly freaking out about the end of the last four years and the beginning of the rest of their lives fractures personal fault lines and they are _fighting bad_.

“And I’m gonna exterminate them! And I’m gonna go outside the walls! I told you, I told you so many times before, I’m gonna see the sea—”

“And _I’m_ the half-wit?” Jean guffaws.

“You’re such a fucking defeatist!”

“Go on, then! Outside the walls your beloved titans are waiting for you!”

Competing visions and miscommunication of real fears does not bode will with spiced wine and cinnamon sticks. Jean is preaching old arrogant fatalist things he doesn’t mean again, and Eren is arguing things he knows he shouldn’t again. Half their friends are cheering. The other half are trying to rip them apart. It’s been a while since their disagreements dissolved into such shows of mannish might and warped defensive pride. Sometimes it’s fun, twisted foreplay.

Maybe because of earlier—maybe not at all—this isn’t one of those times.

“Here they go—”

“Get a room, boys!”

“Jean—Eren—seriously, _tonight_?”

Mikasa elbows her way through the whistles and jeers and drags Eren outside to clear his head while Hannah and Franz back Jean into a corner to simmer down. The uproar in city hall softens and through it slices Jean’s final blow:

“What a lucky man, Eren, with your guard dog Mikasa! I’m sure you’re planning on dragging her off to a bloody death beyond the walls in the Survey Corps, too!”

It’s a bumbling jab; it is spite.

But Eren isn’t so tipsy and riled that he is not wholly sobered by the personal pain hiding behind it.

“You’re too fucking impulsive,” Mikasa swears at him, letting go of him less and shoving him more. The world outside is spinning and Eren loses his balance, hits the flagstone with a grunt and a staggering skid.

“ _Ow_ ,” he snaps.

The moon hangs low over Trost, gauzy clouds ripped to shreds across the velvety sky beyond.

“I’m joining the Survey Corps with you,” Mikasa says into her scarf, avoiding Eren’s eyes.

“I choose the Corps, too,” Armin announces.

And it’s the strangest feeling in the world when a heart breaks out of happiness. Eren is speechless. He is in turmoil tonight, from Jean’s old room to the steps of city hall. The sea inside him is so full of white-capped waves wrestling for supremacy and he isn’t sure what to feel right now. Emancipation? Success? Horror? The silver-lined agony of change?

He stares at his feet. He stares at the road. Armin and Mikasa are beside him. They are always beside him.

“I don’t want to lose any more family…” Mikasa mumbles, and for a moment she is tiny again, she is tiny and fragile and full of fear and she is watching Eren stab a man to death with the eeriest look of wide-eyed worship, a priestess at a sacrifice to her god—

And Armin—Armin’s deep blue eyes are blazing with resolve, a newfound bravery, that saintly wisdom that makes him so much older than he looks, and he is staring at Eren, staring into Eren, he says, “We’re going to see the sea together.” And it is far from wishful thinking. It is a promise.

Eren’s throat tightens. He feels sick but he’s grinning like a madman. He is in shock. It’s a comfortable shock, a relieved shock, an enormous swelling happiness that is so fucking rejuvenating.

He didn’t realize until now how afraid he is of being separated from them.

All the toxic internalized anxiety, all the secret turmoil over _farewell_ and _this is the end_ and _finality_ was for naught—because maybe he always knew deep down—he _knows_ —it will never happen.

They are in this together.

This night will not let any of them forget, deep in the secret places of worry inside them all, that ending up alone is a very real possibility.

But Armin, Mikasa—there is nothing else in the world for them. There never has been. The goddesses have connected them and the goddesses will not have them apart.

And with fresh night air tickling his skin and Armin and Mikasa beside him, Eren’s unconquerable dreams undergo a tiny renewal.

This is real. This is happening. They are soldiers. They will kill titans. They will see the outside world. They will see the sea. There will be fucking justice for all they’ve suffered together. And only those who can keep up with him deserve to see the sea. He will not change for anyone.

_I don’t need you._

_The point of my life is to kill them all._

He wants to sneak into Jean’s dorm—yes, that’s it, go _crawling back_ —because, really, he needs to take a moment and think things through; he needs to _try_ and see the world how others see it; it’s not Jean’s fault they aren’t the same—God, he wants so badly to put the fire back in Jean’s eyes because he can never live with himself if he knows he’s the one that stole it away, but—

He gives Jean space.

He dreams about his father and a long, sterilized needle.

 

  **end.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> march on to [part two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13556916/chapters/31109031)


End file.
